In a community session yesterday at MySQL Conference 2007, I first heard about Dorsal Source. A collaboration between Solid DB and Proven Scaling that allows for community people to upload patches to MySQL, get it compiled across multiple platforms, and have a downloadable distribution available on H/W individual contributors will never have access to.

That’s a great idea. I also hope we get the opportunity to get compiling of patches into multiple versions, as well to get builds of a lot of patches together. Personally, I’m running 3 versions just to diagnose one problem. 5.0.36 with a custom binary change, 5.0.37 so I have SHOW PROFILE, and 5.0.33 so I have …

MySQL Conference 2007 Day 4 started early again at 8:20 am with PHP on Hormones by the father of PHP Ramus Lerdorf.

A very funny man, one of the best insightful talks of the conference (rather scary actually). Here are some opening comments.

• In his own words as Keynote speaker. “I’m here because I’m old”.
• Php 1 from 1994 started after seeing Mozilla in 1993. Because it was just me using it, I could change the language any time.
• In 2005 the code looks like this (in comparison on 1995) — I’m not sure if this is worth 10 years of development
• I wrote PHP to avoid programming
• It’s changed to be more OO because people expect that. Universities teach this.
• Hey, I was fixing bugs in my sleep. Iwould wake up, and in my mail …

mysqlconf mysqlconf07

There are too many Japanese characters to be able to use one byte to handle all of them.

Hiragana — over 50 characters

Katakana — over 50 characters

Kanji — over 6,000 characters

So the Japanese Character set has to be multi-byte. JIS=Japan Industrial Standard, this specifies it.

JIS X 0208 in 1990, updated in 1997 — covers widely used characters, not all characters
JIS X 0213 in 2000, updated in 2004

There are also vendor defined Japanese charsets — NEC Kanji and IBM Kanji — these supplement JIS X 0208.

Cellphone specific symbols have been introduced, so the # of characters is actually increasing!

For JIS X 0208, there are multiple encodings — Shift_JIS (all characters are 2 …

I'll begin with a comic my old boss home-fry Ryan sent me. Cute Shawn :)

So the last day at the MySQL Conference was pretty fun. I learned a few neat tidbits about PHP6, although I was really more interested in ways to make PHP5 stateful. In other words, have mod_php be a full-blown application server similar to Tomcat, but without that whole Java thing, and complicated layer on top, and... well you get the idea. Come to find out, someone has thought of the idea, but nothing is really in the works at the moment. Of course, I suppose one could write a PHP daemon and query it using CGI calls or something. At least, that is what one person suggested, although that seems like a lot of work. The part that bugs me is that PHP has all the components to make it into a nice application server and is just lacking a few components. Uhm, like that actual application server I …

There were a few interesting comment themes that came up in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA talk I gave this morning at the 2007 MySQL Conference:

1. To my point about not getting too crazy about extending the I_S, an attendee who is passionate about SQL standards made the point that the I_S standard specifically mentions that is can/should be extended. Excellent news.
2. There are some serious questions about performance of the I_S tables. More than one attendee commended during and after that the I_S isn't a viable option for them because of how slow it responds when trying to get data.
3. The sample in the presentation didn't show using the conditions, but it is possible for an I_S fill_* function to use the conditions on the query. (I'll …

Another early start. But how could I miss Rasmus talking about PHP. The slides are there if you are interested. The history of PHP is fascinating, and it is interesting to see how it evolved. Rasmus also showed us how the MySQL conference site (run by O’Reilly) and the IBM site were vulnerable to Cross [...]

Also now up is the patch series in my “ndb-work” tree which small patch for adding INFORMATION_SCHEMA.NDB_NODE_STATUS. It’s nearly useful… I haven’t brought in the nice “id to string” functions in the management client that make pretty printing nice… so not quite end user friendly :)

But it’s a nice patch to learn how to add an INFORMATION_SCHEMA table in a pluggable engine and put some engine specific information in it.

(kudos to the falcon code… which i looked at on how to do it).

Doesn’t take long - this was completed in less than 2hrs while watching and paying attention to sessions…. so should take next to no time if you actually concentrate on it.

Of course, this totally abuses the purity of the …

I’ve just put up the current “add node” patch… which is like, totally experimental and kills kittens… but could be interesting for people to have a look at as it progresses. Still lots of work before production ready - but people here at the MySQL Conf have said they’re interested in looking at the code for it.

You can grab a combined patch or the quilt series from:

http://saturn.flamingspork.com/~stewart/ndb-experimental/

Applies to 5.1… at least on a few weeks ago tree.

On Tuesday we kicked off the main conference session with keynotes by Marten Mickos, Guy Kawasaki (famous blogger who talked about the art of innovation) and Mike Evans (from Red Hat who talked about the One Laptop Per Child project).  Photos (including the one above) have been posted by James Duncan Davidson and are available on Flickr. 

Marten's keynote focused on the architecture of participation as well as some of the technology innovation in our community and at MySQL and updates on our business.  Marten also gave awards to our application, partner and community contributors of the year.  The application winners were: YouTube, Adobe and Amp'd mobile.  The partners of the year were: Red Hat, HP and Carahsoft, our government reseller.  And the community members of the year were Sheeri Kritzer (super blogger!), Paul …

MySQL: The Real Grid Database, Mark Callaghan, Chip Turner

A tremendous amount of work also done by Wei Li and Gene Pang.

Google has a large MySQL deployment, and they enhance it as needed.

MySQL@Google: too many queries, transactions, data, and rapid growth. Real workload with OLTP and reporting. Workload at Google is *critical*.

The well known solution is to deploy a “grid database”:

• use many replicas to scale read performance
• shard your data over many masters to scale write performance (vertical partitioning of data)
• sharding is easy, resharding is hard

Large number of small servers, not much capacity lost when a server fails, support as many servers as possible with a few DBAs.

Manageability is important at Google - make all tasks scriptable. Gives you time to solve more interesting problems, and …