Few!  After a long trip (10 hours flight) I’m spending all the time left on preparations for my talks on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Hard work.  You know, like going to a basball game, watching the San Francisco Giants beat the Arizona Diamondbacks with a nice homerun by Barry Bonds.

Zito, the other Barry, pitched a really nice game to help win the game with 1-0.
Aside from all that fun, from an geek viewpoint, I think the video screens in the ballpark are simply awesome.

Until next time,

Matt

Even though MySQL is used to power a lot of web sites and applications that handle large binary objects (BLOBs) like images, videos or audio files, these objects are usually not stored in MySQL tables directly today. The reason for that is that the MySQL Client/Server protocol applies certain restrictions on the size of objects that can be returned and that the overall performance is not acceptable, as the current MySQL storage engines have not really been optimized to properly handle large numbers of BLOBs. To work around these limitations, these projects usually just store a reference to the object (e.g. a path name in a regular file system). This approach works around the limitations applied by the MySQL Server, but results in a disconnection and potential source of inconsistency between the database and the file system content. There was an interesting discussion about that topic on Sheeri's …

Have you taken a look at the MySQL Conference 2007 schedule yet? With just one day to start, I’d advise you to take a gander. So many interesting things, that my only complaint (well, a suggestion) is that I hope that these talks get a video recording and they should be given to attendees via the web. Apple have done this for WWDC, and linux.conf.au did a great job in 2007 to record every session.

Why video recording? Because each block of time, have 8 sessions, in where about 3-5 sessions on average can be interesting. Last I checked, I couldn’t split myself.

Sure the slides will make it online eventually, but the talk itself is where most interest really is at, I believe.

Yesterday I got to San Francisco, after a 35 hour trip from Spain, where I will be attending MySQL User Conference at Santa Clara. First time in the US

Although the trip was really long, it was an experience by itself. In Madrid, people at the passport control must have been thirsty as they stole my bottle of water. Then, I had a transfer flight in Amsterdam, the capital of legal drugs and prostitution, where before boarding the plane I got asked quite many questions concerning my luggage (who packed it, who owns it, did somebody give anything else to carry, why did I come to Amsterdam, why did it take so long to cross the airport, am I sure of everything I am saying).

But the funniest was when I got to the US. The plane landed in Minneapolis, which I always though to be a II World War battle …

ActiveRecord, by Rabble.

• Rails ActiveRecord is mostly database agnostic.
• Good subset of the SQL standard is supported, so you can migrate very easily (this is what OS X Leopard will do - develop using sqlite on your workstation, then migrate to mysql on the server).
• Integer primary keys, and classname_id foreign keys. Single table inheritance is what really works well.
• What ActiveRecord doesn’t like:

1. views
2. stored procedures
3. FK constraints
4. cascading commits
5. split/clustered DBs
6. enums

• Complexity is best located in the code, not in the database, according to the Rails developers.
• Avoid SQL injection with find. Use an array or let it do the …

I am giving a tutorial ("Real-world MySQL Performance Tuning") at the MySQL conference Monday afternoon. I giving it with Jay Pipes and I think it's going to be pretty fun. We are covering quite ways to think about similar problems (and when we have overlap we often disagree! Talk about getting a "two-for-one"! :-) I did a trial run of my longer version for la.pm a month ago and I think I figured out how to pace the length, but we'll see on monday. It's tricky! I had the 45 minute version down pretty well, but in December I gave a one hour version at the Web Builder conference in Las Vegas and that was too little time for the version I had there to be as fun as it should be.

Uh oh, our tutorial is …

I am giving a tutorial ("Real-world MySQL Performance Tuning") at the MySQL conference Monday afternoon. I giving it with Jay Pipes and I think it's going to be pretty fun. We are covering quite ways to think about similar problems (and when we have overlap we often disagree! Talk about getting a "two-for-one"! :-) I did a trial run of my longer version for la.pm a month ago and I think I figured out how to pace the length, but we'll see on monday. It's tricky! I had the 45 minute version down pretty well, but in December I gave a one hour version at the Web Builder conference in Las Vegas and that was too little time for the version I had there to be as fun as it should be.

Uh oh, our tutorial is …

I meant to post this earlier, but starting today I am on a pretty lengthy tour of the USA. First stop is San Francisco, but only for this weekend. On Monday I will move to San Jose to join up the MySQL User Conference for 3 days. Then its back to San Francisco until May 1st to chat with the fine folks at the local Optaros office. At this point I will fly to Austin, location of yet another Optaros office. Then on the evening of May 4th I will fly to Tampa to spend a few quality days at my parents house in Palmetto. On May 14th its time to visit the main Optaros HQ in Boston. But after only 2 days I am already flying to Chicago to php|tek. On May 18th I am flying back to Zurich. However immediately on arrival on the 19th I am hoping back in a plane to Berlin to celebrate …

Do you want to say hi? Pick up a free bottle opener (I haven’t seen them yet but Jeremy says they are high quality)? Sway my opinion on DRBD? Most of my time at the user conference this year will be spent at the Proven Scaling corner of the Solid booth. I also have the privilege of participating in Meet the Experts “Replication in the Real World” event at the Solid booth during lunch on Wednesday.

The after lunch talk on Business Scripting Languages, by Asuman Suenbuel and Murray Spork was something I found very hard to stay awake in. In fact, I think so did many others, some of whom walked out of the room.

The first half of the talk was filled with SAP marketing spiel, something I think should sincerely stay away from conferences that are tech-oriented. When you hear a word like “SOA”, you already know you’re in the wrong talk. Greg the architect video (link courtesy Leslie Wu), now that was funny. Saving grace, and they do mention the movies are not from SAP. Figures. SOA is like a clothes wardrobe was the other video, with some somewhat hot looking girl - sure, again, saving grace.

Model-driven development (this is not UML - this is more like the Eclipise …