This time of year has the MySQL Conference where everyone interested in MySQL, or who are partners, can go to the USA and learn new techniques and features coming out in the up and coming MySQL versions.

Being a MySQL consulting and training partner, this is one of our most important conference and networking times of the year and as such our office will be closed over these 2 weeks.

Cybersite is still contactable through either email or via instant messenger and can help with remote work if time permits. Otherwise, we will be back in Australia at the beginning of May ready to present the knowledge learned at the conference.

Tomorrow morning (11.5hrs time actually) I’ll be on a plane to SFO (then down to Santa Clara) in preparation for the MySQL Conference.

So, if you’re in the area - give us a buzz. My aussie phone will work, as will traditional email.

Also on IRC… should be easy to find me (freenode).

Jay has written an excellent summary of sessions at the MySQL Conference & Expo that will be particularly interesting for developers using MySQL to power their applications or web sites. I noticed that he did not explicitely mentioned the Perl scripting language, even though there actually are a few sessions that will be of interest for the Perl Mongers amongst us (I would not dare to claim I am one myself, I just hack on it in my spare time):

• There will be a tutorial about "Real-world MySQL Performance Tuning", held …

Xing is Europe's leading Business Network with more than 2 million members. Recently, Xing announced that they would come up with an API later this year to get access to the network. As far as I know, Xing was developed by ePublica using Perl and MySQL.

Having an API is essential in these mashup days. I was invited to the private alpha test and implemented a reference implementation of an API client via PHP5 which behaves like SOAPClient (but uses ReST as the transport mechanism) and overloads the methods that are available.

Here's an example of how to call it currently (API is …

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 …