In my fourth day at the MySQL Conference and Expo 2007, I attended several great sessions, starting with my own. If you’re wondering why this is a day late, it’s because the conference ended in the late afternoon, and they almost immediately – within a half-hour or so – removed the free wireless Internet access in the hotel. That was uncool. Keynotes etc I skipped the opening keynotes to polish off last-minute changes to innotop and my presentation.

Closing keynote of the 2007 MySQL Conference is Pasha Sadri from Yahoo! talking about pipes.

Pasha starts with a story about looking for an apartment near a park (this happened to him a few years ago). It was very tedious to go looking on Craigslist every hour clicking on every apartment and looking to see if the apartment was near a park.

Made a 50-line Perl script to merge database between Craigslist and Yahoo! local to get data sets. This turned into Yahoo! pipes which provides a visual editor to take data sources and create a set of controls over that data source and output the data in a certain way.

If you haven't seen pipes it is hard to describe, but very cool.

For design, pipes relied heavily on the idea of Unix pipes. The goal to …

Adobe open sources Flex. MySQL AB releases new performance benchmarks. SugarCRM supports Oracle Unbreakable Linux. (and more)

Adobe to Open Source Flex, Adobe (Press Release)

MySQL AB Announces Record Cluster Database Benchmark Results, MySQL AB (Press Release)

SugarCRM Expands Support for Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support, SugarCRM (Press Release)

EMC and Oracle Join Forces Under the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support Program, Oracle (Press Release)

…

mysqlconf mysqlconf07

It’s not easy to do a DW in MySQL — but it’s not impossible either. Easier to go to Teradata than to write your own.

DW characteristics:

1) Organic, evolves over time from OLTP systems — issues, locking, large queries, # of userss.

2) Starts as a copy of OLTP, but changes over time — schema evolution, replication lag, duplicate data issues

3) Custom — designed from the ground up for DW — issues with getting it started, growth, aggregations, backup.

4) How do you update the data in the warehouse? — write/update/read/delete, write/read/delete, or write only — which means that roll out requires partitions or merge tables.

The secret to DW is partitioning — can be based on:
data — date, groups …

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 [...]