On Saturday, June 16 2007, Ibuildings and Zend Technologies are organizing the Dutch PHP Conference 2007. The event is intended for professional PHP developers and will be held in the RAI in Amsterdam.

The program is mostly in English, offering about 15 speakers and three separate tracks: Frameworks, Case studies and a separate data-oriented/database track. I will be speaking there about MySQL stored routines, and how …

Sheeri, a good friend of mine has been working very hard to record, process and then publish hours and hours of MySQL conference videos. She has published the recordings on Technocation.

One request that I wanted to make to everyone is that if you download videos or presentations from Technocation, please consider giving a little back in form of a donation. All that goes in Technocation is ultimately for the benefit of the community. And remember, every little bit counts.

Kristian is currently talking about the new NdbRecord API for the NDBAPI and how it relates to ha_ndbcluster (the mysql storage engine, which uses ndbapi to talk to the cluster nodes) and how it can be used by ndbapi applications.

It looks like we’re getting a really neat API that avoids so much mess and makes it possible to write incredibly efficient mappings between what comes over the wire from data nodes and whatever internal structures the application wants to fill out.

Talking about this and Monty Taylor’s ORM mapping stuff could be very interesting.

A few days ago, I received a MySQL Chart from Bob Stein of VisiBone and immediately hung it on the wall.

And just a minute ago, I used it for the first time to check the syntax of an INSTR() command I couldn’t get to work. Sure enough, there’s a small “bomb” icon next to it to make me aware that the order of the arguments may not be what you expect.

Even though the poster is large (61cmx85cm / 24″x33″), there’s a lot of information that’s been stuck on there and it takes a few minutes to learn to navigate it properly. But once you get it, it’s a great tool to quickly look up syntax and other information.

There’s a lot of small icons beside each command and function giving some hints about best usage, things to be aware of, etc. — Including a black circle to tell you that …

Today is Fotolog's 5th birthday. For a quick history of Fotolog, see John Borthwick (CEO) and Adam Seifer's (co-founder) posts.

From Peter Z's Blog: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/05/22/wishes-for-mysqldump/

I noticed this:

Parallel restore This is absolutely required if time is the issue as serious systems may perform much better in such case.


In 5.1 I added the following option to mysqlimport "--use-threads".

With it you can now tell mysqlimport to use multiple threads while doing an import of a backup made with mysqldump where you specified dumping the database in tab format. I don't believe I have a graph anywhere showing the speedup, but its pretty damn impressive.

Oh, and what is especially nifty about this?

Just take a copy of mysqlimport from the 5.1 distribution and use it on your previous versions of MySQL. I can't promise it will work with …

Here are some random thoughts, notes, observations, etc.

Jay Pipes - he made the conference possible

• Friendster uses Bugzilla internally. Yes they’re still alive, even though MySpace and so forth are around and kicking. Had to Google them (I wanted to find their old talk about their storage engine), and found MySQL Customers - Friendster, instead. From 2005, Dathan’s (now at Flickr) presentation. Never did find the storage engine stuff, beyond random bits in the press.
• Probably the best blog post that hit Planet MySQL, as opposed to the session summaries and so on, comes from …

NOTE: Problems presently exist, I’m seeking the expert help of the community and Perl Gurus

I have the need to do some quick benchmarking, I use MyBench as it’s effective in being able to plug in a query, some randomness and 2 minutes later (with a correctly configured Perl/MySQL environment) you have multi-threaded load testing.

However, when the environment you are on is not configured, and you only know the basics for Perl Operation and Installation, (code is just code, that’s the easy part) and the box is not accessible to the outside world say for cpan, it gets more complicated. I’ve attempted to install and configure DBI, DBD::mysql and …

MySQL's version-specific conditional comment syntax confused me for the longest time. Then I learned about printf formatting rules, and it all became clear. Read on if you don't already know what I mean.

Mark Shuttleworth on software patents: Microsoft is not the real threatThe real threat to Linux is the same as the real threat to Microsoft, and that is a patent suit from a person or company that is NOT actually building software, but has filed patents on ideas that the GNU project and Microsoft are equally likely to be implementing.Interesting thought... and actually, not just a thought: Microsoft alumnus Nathan Myhrvold is busy accumulating patents with his Intellectual Ventures company. There's more like that around...

I'm thinking... perhaps money (greed, that is) will solve this problem after all. These companies have nothing else going on except to try and arrange licensing deals. And thus companies producing a lot cash (big licensing potential) will be the prime targets. And, funnily …