In addition to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007, which I just registered for (yes, its not too late, register now!), I also registered for the Second Annual Silicon Valley Ruby Conference. Its at The Tech Museum in San Jose (I honestly have no idea where that is from the Hyatt Santa Clara, but I’m sure a nice taxi driver will), and of things that will clearly interest me are:

Day 1
9:15am - 10:15am Full-Stack Web App Testing with Selenium and Rails - Alex Chaffee
12:30pm - 1:30pm Business Scripting Languages - Asuman Suenbuel and Murray Spork
2:40pm - 3:40pm ActiveRecord - Evan (Rabble) Henshaw-Plath

Day 2
9:15am - …

Coincidence? No, serendipity. Last week I was on the bus going back home. This usually takes half an hour so I don’t have much to do except listen to music and think in absurd things like this.

I wondered what would happen if you ask google maps for directions from one place to another if there’s no road between those two. Hector got the answer today. Say you want to go from the new Warp HQ to the MySQL HQ (BTW, I’ve been there today and the sakila dolphin plush is awesome). No problem at all, google knows the way

I was at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo earlier today to participate in a panel on next generation web 2.0 platforms and how the hardware, software and network infrastructure would evolve.  The panel had a diverse crowd ranging from a Microsoft dude who had experience with 1,000+ server scale-out scenarios, a networking appliance guru from Crescendo Networks, one of the guys from Amazon's EC2 web services initiative and the moderator Alistair Croll from Coradiant who is a serious data center infrastructure and performance management wiz. Being a software guy, it had a bit more hardware / networking focus than I'm used to. 

As …

Robin Schumacher recently gave us an excellent rundown on sessions at the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo (April 23-26th in Santa Clara) for DBAs. As a proud developer I wanted to make sure that our enormous developer community had a similar guide. Now, developers will encounter the same problem that Robin pointed out: with so many excellent sessions, you'll be required to make some difficult choices sometimes in what sessions you attend. This guide will hopefully allow you to navigate the waters. I've broken the guide down into a general section and also into programming language specific sections.

I posted a note last week about the new beta of MySQL 5.1 being released (5.1.17). One thing that we believe needs a special call out is the fact that prepared statements can now work with the query cache. Observe:

Enter password: *******
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 3
Server version: 5.1.17-beta-community-nt-debug MySQL Community Server (GPL)
        
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.
        
mysql> show global variables like '%query_cache%';
+------------------------------+---------+
| Variable_name                | Value   |
+------------------------------+---------+
| have_query_cache             | YES     |
| query_cache_limit            | 1048576 |
| query_cache_min_res_unit     | 4096    |
| query_cache_size             | 8388608 |
| query_cache_type             | ON      |
| query_cache_wlock_invalidate | OFF     |
+------------------------------+---------+
6 rows in …

In the spirit of our Free Ride program, Proven Scaling is offering fifty (50) free MySQL certification vouchers at this year’s MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California from April 23 through April 26.

You must be present at the conference to pick up the free passes, and they are only good at the at-conference certification testing area during the conference itself on April 24-26. Each voucher is good for one test, but it’s up to you which test you take.

Go to Proven Scaling FreeCert to enter!

I just pushed out version 0.03 of the awss3 storage engine.

There should be no user visible changes, it's all under the hood stuff.

Available via hg and tarball.

Rod Johnson, author of the Spring framework, thinks open source is hot right now, but its a “bubble” ready to burst, according to an article titled What Makes An Open Source Project Successful? by Charles Babcock.

Most open source projects are supported by an army of volunteers who buy into the hype, but “capitalism will inevitably reassert itself” and developers will find they need to put more effort into steady jobs and private lives, leaving “open source zombies”–unsupported, unmaintained projects–he predicts.

This is true, with many a project, that hasn’t built a successful ecosystem. Keep in mind that with the gazillion text editors out there, not all stand the test of time, like Emacs and vim do. Capitalism is always going to win hands down, because money in its essence is important to survival. Go …

We’ve been doing some tests with medium sized data sets lately.  We extracted around half a year of data (514M rows) from a warehouse where we’re doing a database partitioning and clustering test.
Below is an example where we copy +500M rows from one database to another one that is partitioned. (MS SQL Server to MySQL 5.1).  This is done using the following transformation.  In stead of just using one partitioned writer, we used 3 to speed up the process. (lowers latency).

Copying 500M rows is just as easy as copying a thousand, it just takes a little longer…

It would have completed the task a lot faster if we wouldn’t have been copying to a single table on DB4 at the same time. (yep, again 500M rows) This slowed down the transformation to the maximum speed of DB4.  That being said, if you still had any doubt about Pentaho Data Integration being able to copy large volumes of data, …