Saturday and Sunday I attended SDForu.m's 2nd silicon valley ruby conference.

I attended to scope out what the Ruby community was up to, see what the skillsets are like, etc. I've been trying to get into Ruby myself for a few months. Slowly getting there.

The conference was at The Tech in san jose. Was a nice cozy room. One room, one track, speakers came up one after the other. Most of it was interesting. JRuby, Rubinius look like a lot of fun to hack with. The ruby folks also have a good grasp on systems administration, admiringly. Capistrano and friends assist them in automatically deploying software.

Rails was a bit of a whipping boy at the conference. "Look! Ruby is actually fast! Rails is slow!" As was the MRI interpreter. At the same time there's a lot of love for both. Everyone …

There are a lot of The Conference starts tomorrow posts up right now, so here's mine.

I got down to Sunnyvale this morning leaving downtown San Francisco for five days. I stay at the Pacific Inn in Sunnyvale which is a convenient ten minute ride from the Santa Clara Convention Center, where the conference starts tomorrow.

I met a few *cough* guys from MySQL already, which is great, it's been years since I've seen some them. I look forward to meet all the rest you!

Also, make sure to follow my twitting through the conference.

And I finally got to meet Damien, woohoo! ;-)

For the past week I've been delving into the internals of MySQL and especially of mysql-test. There is more than enough documentation for me to become familiar with before the actual work gets rolling, but it has been a hands on process which helps a great deal. Running the test cases with mysql-test-run.pl is finally working on my computer but now I'm looking into the gcov tools but I'm having a hard time finding documentation and explaination of exactly how it works. However, the more I tinker around with it the more I'm figuring out so I'll just keep on moving and asking questions along the way when necessary.

My goals for the next week are to continue figuring out gcov so I can get a grasp of the problem I have intended to solve this summer and to get increasingly familiar with the MySQL code itself.

Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) has worked with news and information leader Reuters to help upgrade the underlying platform for Reuters.com and transform its global news websites to provide next-generation capabilities and news delivery.

Solution Initiative to Be Featured at MySQL Conference April 24
Unisys and Reuters architects will present a case study on the Reuters implementation today, April 24, at the MySQL Conference. The presentation will be at 5:30 p.m. PDT in Ballroom H of the Santa Clara Convention Center.

In my first day at the MySQL Conference and Expo 2007, I attended the Scaling and High Availability Architectures tutorial in the morning, and Real-world MySQL Performance Tuning in the afternoon. This is a brief article on each session’s Big Ideas, and a short blurb about the conference overall so far. I’ll also be involved in at least three sessions at the conference, and I describe them. If you’re interested in short overviews of the sessions I attend, keep watching for my articles.

I've arrived safe, and mostly sound. My laptop battery is just a little bit shorter than the flight from SEA to SJC. The MySQL employees are being subjected to staff meetings and then Mandatory Party, while I get to putter around the hotel and conviention center. Also going on right now in the convention center is a meeting for people with dyslexia, a meeting for regional veterinarians, a "Coin Stamp and Collectables" show (sponsored by eBay), and a bird mart. Apparently, last year it was a convention of workworking hobbyests, which would have been pretty darn cool.

I finished my slides last night, then showed them to Sheeri, who promptly and properly critiqued them to heck and back. I had basically done every bad thing from every bad ppt presentation I had ever been forced to sit thru. So I stayed up and rewrote them into something much more lively. (The key rule of thumb is to but the …

One of the main questions we get at Proven Scaling is “Where do we find MySQL DBAs, Architects, and Developers?”

Next week is the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California. Inspired by the success of our impromptu job board at MySQL Camp last year (although whiteboards with no moderation tend to get messy), we decided to make a more formal job board this year. Something much more prominent, more organized, cleaner, and easier for both employers and job seekers to use. With great thanks to Solid for allowing us to use some of their Expo Hall space, we will have a formal job board in the Expo Hall, which is open April 24th and 25th.

We will have several “wall” panels at the edge of …

"Aw keep my feathers numbered for just such an emergency...."

This is a good time to take inventory, and see what I am doing wrong.

Code The good news is that my code is in tact. I have code broken up into three groups:
code
tangent
mysql

"code" is source code that make up the one shot programs. I need to test something, I need a simple client application... these were on the backup. And if I lost them? No harm no foul. I know from conversations with Tridge that he loves to keep this stuff around, but frankly I can never see any of mine being of use to anyone other then me.

"tangent" these are all of my projects. Everything here that has any value is in revision control, except one project... kept meaning to move that one. Oh well. Its lost, and I can probably write it better the second time (a good 40 hours worth of coding... grrr...).

…

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 …