This morning as I was driving over to the MySQL conference I thought about something Guy Kawasaki said yesterday. He said that one indicator of a sketchy VC-seeking group is if their proposal includes a large chunk of money for database licenses ("a million dollars"). The idea was that if you're building a new product there's a better chance of funding if you use something like MySQL and don't have to spend a lot of the investment on your database.

Flash back to mid to late 90s. From my limited experience this was opposite. The company I worked for was using Oracle for one reason, because it made them look serious when talking to funders. It meant that we were serious about scalability and poised to handle the heavy click loads. (The ironic thing is that we weren't. The application fell flat on it's face during even minimal …

Listening to Bdale Garbee, the Open Source & Linux Chief Technologist at HP, at the 2007 MySQL Conference.

Bdale helps HP pick the clever things to do the maximize how they can help open source software.

What is community? Might be towns, schools, churches, sports teams, volunteer organizations. The internet made a new type of community. Folks with common interest but are dispersed geographically can now be a community.

Bdale talks a lot about the Linux community and contributions and how things have evolved over the years.

HP sells and ships a new server every 11 seconds. Based on they percentate of Linux servers that sell, they ship a Linux server every minute.

The second "keynote" of Wednesday morning at the 2007 MySQL Conference is Kaj Arno refereeing a conversation between a number of "database egos." Since MySQL has a number of storage engines there are a handful of folks who have founded major database technology efforts that can be used from MySQL.

Monty Widenius: Co-founder of MySQL [answers a lot of the typical quesitons about how MySQL started].

Heikki Tuuri: created InnoDB. Worked for Solid and then went to University and decided to start with something new. Monty convinced him to open source.

Mikael Ronstrom: Father of 5 children and creator of MySQL Cluster. Came from Ericcson.

Jim Starkey: Father of many databases, most recently the Falcon storage engine.

Ari Valtanen: CTO of Solid Information Technology.

Paul Whittington: Father of NitroDB. …

mysql 5.2 is now mysql 6.0:

6.0 is basically the falcon release with subquery optimizer additions.


6.1 Online backup, more subquery optimizations, foreign keys for main engines, and more performance diagnostics.


Online Backup Detail:
Cross Engine Support
Non-blocking for DML, ie. INSERT UPDATE not blocking
Blocking on DDL still
SQL command driven
Full server database and point in time recovery

Nitro Engine:
Extreme insertion rates
Linear CPU rates

PBXT

In beta
Not ACID complient but sort - of
Very fast rollbacks
Very few config tweaks


MYSQL Enterprise (Paid use Server)

• 
  
• Support, Server, and tools
  
  
  • Monitoring Tools:
    
    
  • New Replication …

The first keynote of Wednesday morning at MySQL Conf 2007 is Even Moglen, a professor at Columbia currently on leave, serving as the Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center.

Eben describes some of the very early ways that information and experiences were captured. He talks about the mind as the place where experiences were stored. Pictures in the mind are kept as a part of our memory.

Privacy is not just the big secret you have that you don't want anyone to know. Identity theft is not just someone knowing four pieces of information. The loss of privacy people looking at your data and inferring what you will do next. The powerful organizations of the future will be able to aggregate.

Your browsing history used to be in the browser. Now it is a service. You give all of your browsing history to someone …

So Shirley sent me an SMS to let me know my rehearsal was scheduled, and I managed to set up my (Linux) laptop with the projector, so I’m all set. Special thanks to Lauren from O’Reilly conferences who is awesome with computers and projectors, and didn’t blink an eye when I told him we might [...]

Mark Atwood, a good friend of mine, is presenting a session on Amazon S3 Storage engine for MySQL.

Primary key has to be utf-8. Results coming back in less than 70ms. "If you build it, they will come".

A bucket is fully virtually hosted, it gives you a virtual SQL CMS for S3. You can put billion photographs.

Transactional engine? No it's not. S3 service is not transactional. There are no temporal guarantees in S3. If you start doing writes on a table and someone else starts then it may take some time for it show up. The reason is S3 is very distributed. Amazon S3 replicates it all over.

If you put no WHERE clause then you can "make money fast" for Amazon.

There are many opportunities. It keeps MD5 hash of contents of Blob. There is also ACL. S3 handles HTTPS but it isn't implemented yet in the storage engine?

There are other Amazon services that can use …

I am sitting in Dathan's full room session.

In 2005 they came up with Federation.

Key components of federation.

Shards are taking single master data containing a fraction of user content. A global ring is the ability to get to a shard. Think of it as a DNS. They calculate where your data is at that moment in time. Then they have PHP logic to connect to the shards (10 lines of codes).

Shards are slice of main database and are set up in Active Master-Master Ring replication which is done by sticking a user to a server in a shard. Shard assignments are from a random number for new accounts. Migration is done from time to time and shards can run on any hardware grade they just have to adjust number of users per shard. They have issues with auto-increment and 4.1. They have external processes that balance data across other shards. They move people all the time.

Global ring is aka …

Saw this table definition in a system I was working on:

CREATE TABLE session_role (
Session_sessionId bigint(20) NOT NULL,
activeRoles_roleId varchar(255) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY(Session_sessionId,activeRoles_roleId),
UNIQUE KEY activeAccounts_actorId (activeRoles_roleId),
KEY `FK38CC06CCF5B03D50` (Session_sessionId),
KEY `FK38CC06CC4085AE4` (activeRoles_roleId),
CONSTRAINT `FK38CC06CC4085AE4` FOREIGN KEY (activeRoles_roleId)
REFERENCES role(roleId),
CONSTRAINT `FK38CC06CCF5B03D50` FOREIGN KEY (Session_sessionId)
REFERENCES session (sessionId)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

This is four indexes for a two-column table! Of course nobody has actually written this, this is generated by JBoss/Hibernate, with a MySQL database used for storing data. Be very careful with code generators....

Did you ever think of a worm that could crawl from MySQL server to MySQL server, infecting systems all over the world? MySQL 5.1 adds a feature that makes this scenario possible. I'm not talking about some sort of buffer overflow or similar attack vectors that need knowledge of machine language to be exploited. I'm talking about a worm written completely in pure SQL.

The idea was in my head for a little bit more than a year. But now that I did a proof of concept together with Markus Popp tonight at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara and words started to spread quickly, I think it's better to just publish this right away (now that MySQL 5.1 is not in production yet).

The idea is actually pretty simple, you just need two components to implement a worm spreading from server to server with pure SQL:

1. A way to connect to a remote MySQL server from within MySQL: That's what the …