Day 3 Photos

Okay - so it’s the morning - and the battel of the database egos session has just finished. Some photos up already!

Bdale is just about to start now… maybe some photos soon :)

Tony (my fiancee) says it best — he’s an amazing writer. For some history, I work for a dating site that caters to gay men:

MySQL is database software. Whenever a computer program or system (like, say, a gay man’s online dating service) needs to randomly access, store, and keep track of a bunch of data “stuff” (like, say, a bunch of fruits, their personal information and, uh, “vital statistics”), it puts it into and maintains a database.

MySQL (http://www.mysql.com) is a very popular, very good database system. It’s the one Sheeri uses at her job, and my company is currently test-driving a new way to put together web sites that relies on a MySQL database.

An interesting feature of it is that it’s what’s called “open source” software. That means that the community of users is also largely the community of developers. Anyone using the software who …

Curiouser and curiouser....

IBM today announced a technology and marketing partnership that will have IBM selling MySQL's database, among other things:

The agreement calls for IBM and MySQL to develop software that will make MySQL compatible with programs that run IBM's System i line of business computers, including IBM's i5 operating system DB2 database. IBM will also sell MySQL's service products.Just when I thought IBM was getting stodgy and provincial in its views on open source, it does something like this. This is news because:

1. IBM's DB2 competes with MySQL, and

2. MySQL is GPL (though dual-licensed under commercial terms), and IBM has tended to be somewhat Apache-centric, its Linux (and Eclipse - yes, I know that IBM does more than BSD-style licensing) …

This is, of course, about Pessimistic and Optimistic--the two concurrency control interfaces used in database products. The idea is simple--or not, depending whether you confuse it with something else or not. Very often it is being confused with another pair of alternative choices in concurrency control: single-version (update-in-place) or multiversion concurrency control (MVCC). This is because of some natural predisposition: the pessimistic approach is typically used with update-in-place methods, while MVCC leans towards the optimistic approach. However, it does not have to be that way always because, for example, in the Solid's native product, solidDB, the choice of Pessimistic and Optimistic is given with both the mutiversioning disk-based engine and update-in-place in-memory engine. And, because the Solid's disk-based engine is available now under MySQL, the choice is extended to MySQL users, too.

So, what is Pessimistic? That is very …

So by now you know about the DB2 storage engine for MySQL....

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21430.wss

I'm getting questions on how this can possibly work.

The answer is that MySQL Storage Engine layer is flexible, and most databases are designed around a stack that can work with it.

Databases parse, optimize, and fetch data. We have integrated engines at all levels of this stack. Some engines even work with a combination of layers.

Let us take Innodb for example. It has its own, though small, stored procedure language. We integrate for most queries with what is the optimizer layer in Innodb. We open up cursors inside of Innodb and then read those cursors. What happens when you do a rename table on an Innodb table? It executes a stored procedure to update Innodb's own …

Day 2 Photos

I gave my Intro to Cluster talk and then a Design and Internals of MySQL Cluster.

Also some photos from the DRBD BoF in the evening (which was really good). So was the BLOB streaming BoF earlier (but I didn’t take my camera out).

Currently in Eben’s keynote on Wednesday morning. As always, insightful and thought provoking.

World of awesome.

mysqlconf mysqlconf07

“What societies value is what they memorize. And how they memorize it and who has access to its memorized form determines who has power.”

We’re starting to become a society that “memorizes” private facts — not just public records being written down, but private thoughts, dreams and wishes.

“Living largely in a world of expensive written material and seeking to build a private database of things experienced and learned, early modern Europeans built in their minds memory palaces — imaginary rooms furnished with complex bric-a-brac and decorations. . . By walking through the rooms of the memory palace in their minds, [they] remembered things they needed to know.”

Photographs took a factual and emotional snapshot of experience …

Day 1 Photos

This is the day of the MySQL Cluster Tutorial that I gave… which seemed to go down rather well.

(btw, those photos are served out of a gallery instance running on top of MySQL Cluster) .

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.