Last week I attended and spoke at the MySQL conference. Some of the talks, particularly the ones that targeted system administrators rather than developers were over my head, but that's useful information in itself -- it serves as a reminder that sometime soon I'll need to either learn the finer points of big-time MySQL system administrator or hire somebody who does.

It was particularly fun giving a talk on .NET to MySQL guys just two weeks after I finished giving a talk on MySQL to a room full of .NET guys. It was also fun seeing my client Alfresco and hanging out with them in their booth, where they were doing demos and fielding lots of inquiries.

I'm just now getting around to firing up the blog-o-matic in earnest after four weeks of more or less non-stop conference-going, but I wanted to mention that I've released the tool that we use to create the data access layer. It's …

Today we've announced the availability of Connector/Net 5.1.0 Alpha.  This is a very exciting release for us as it's the first time we've made available our ASP.Net 2.0 web providers and our compact framework support.  This release also folds in our Tools for Visual Studio into a single installer. 

To that end, we are dropping Tools for Visual Studio as as separate download.  Going forward, you can select Visual Studio integration as an option directly from the Connector/Net installer.  All the same functionality is there, but packaging the products in this way will simplify bug fixes to the products and give our users a better out of box experience.

We encourage anyone using our products to try out this latest release and let us know what you think.  You can read our official release announcement here.

Woohoo, I finally got a bit of spare time to blog — my first blog post ever! I chose to talk about a technique I used at a client’s site to report the topmost space-wasting objects in an Oracle database. I was looking for a way to detect these objects without having to run some expensive [...]

Microsoft recently announced that they are removing the Entity Framework and tools from Visual Studio "Orcas" and will, instead, ship them as an update in the first half of 2008.  It's pretty easy to see this as YAMM (Yet Another Microsoft Miss) but I instead look at this as a very positive sign of things changing.

Microsoft is accelerating many of the development timelines and embracing the "release early, release often" methodology.  It seems that almost every Microsoft product these days comes out as a CTP about a million times even before it his beta stage.  This just means greater awareness and better adoption.  MS is even releasing alot more code as open source as they recently announced a Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) that supports languages such as Python and Ruby.  They are releasing it under …

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  …

For years Slashdot trolls would just complain that MySQL was nothing more then an interface to the filesystem.

So what does someone go off and do?

Create exactly that.

http://code.google.com/p/mysql-filesystem-engine/

The engine was written by Google's Chip Turner and can process any file that the database has access too (though exactly how the parsing works I am unsure about, I've only read the code related to the actual engine). The example given is this:

mysql> CREATE TABLE LoadAverage (
load1 DECIMAL(3, 2),
load5 DECIMAL(3, 2),
load15 DECIMAL(3, 2),
active_processes VARCHAR(12),
lastpid INTEGER) ENGINE=FILESYSTEM connection="file:///proc/loadavg";
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from LoadAverage;
…

The conference is over, and it was a great week but pretty exhausting! From what I saw, and from what I have heard the sessions were of a very high standard this year. I have come back with a number of new ideas and quite a few things I would like to implement in PBXT. One of these is new online backup API for MySQL which will enable you to make a snapshot backup of data stored by all engines, and do point in time recovery.

For me the week started off with the BoF on scalable BLOB streaming on Tuesday evening. The BoF was well attended and there was significant interest in the topic. I will be reporting on some of the issues discussed soon.

On Wednesday morning I presented: PrimeBase XT - Design and Implementation of a Transactional Storage Engine. I was pleased with the number …

Just a quick note to let everyone know that the new MySQL 6.0 alpha is now available for download. At last week’s MySQL User’s Conference, all the Falcon sessions were packed so there is definitely a lot of interest about our new transactional storage engine. Do note the version number change - previous alpha’s were labeled 5.2, but we’ve now made the decision to move to 6.0 for the Falcon release of the MySQL Server.

The latest alpha contains bug fixes, performance improvements, and the first cut of the new diagnostic/performance views (contained inside the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database) that helps DBA’s get insight into how well Falcon is performing and the resources it’s using:

mysql> show tables like 'FAL%';
+-------------------------------------+
| Tables_in_information_schema (FAL%) |
+-------------------------------------+
| FALCON_RECORD_CACHE_SUMMARY         |
| FALCON_SYSTEM_MEMORY_DETAIL         |
| …

Always remember, if you’re using MyIsam tables, KEEP THE INDEX AS SMALL AS POSSIBLE. That means, your full text index will be huge and you don’t want to keep them together with other types of index for faster queries. Simply create another table to have the text fields and full text indexes and left join. It works [...]

Over at mysql.bkbits.net you can also get the “telco” (commonly known as CGE or “Carrier Grade Edition”) source trees of MySQL Cluster.

I think it’s exciting that we now have the source trees up here. You can use the freely available bk client to pull the sources or the commercial bitkeeper.

Since I just got back from the US for the MySQL UC (which was rather awesome) I don’t quite have the energy to go into the difference between normal mysql 5.1 and the telco trees… so wait for part 2 :)