In my fourth day at the MySQL Conference and Expo 2007, I attended several great sessions, starting with my own.

Pasha Sadri from Yahoo gave the final keynote presentation at the mySQL conference on his work with Yahoo Pipes. He began his presentation talking about problems he was having grinding through craigslist and other RSS feeds to extract useful information. He thought about how he could build something that solved similar problems for others trying to do the same kinds of things.

Pipes is a RSS mashup tool that allow you to combine RSS feed and apply transformations on the data and create a new feed. If you haven’t seen it, you ought to check it out. Several good technical reviews here, here and …

I recorded many of the sessions I attended at the conference. You can download the audio files in Ogg Vorbis format here. These files will not stay up forever – I will probably remove them after a few weeks. My recorder only records in mp3 format, so I was forced to crank the bitrate down pretty far to avoid ending up with gigabytes of data. Too bad it doesn’t record directly to Ogg Vorbis format; if it did, I could get natural-sounding voice-quality at something like 8 kB/sec.

On advice of the MySQL She-BA, I wanted to see what performance I could get with MERGE tables. In my particular application I'm going to need the RI I get with InnoDB, so it's not a solution, but as long as I am investigating anyway...

Seems simple enough, let me the MERGE table over my existing tables:

mysql> create table xyz_mt (
    -> `id` bigint(10) NOT NULL default '0',
    -> `report_dt` date default NULL,
    -> `acct_id` varchar(8) default NULL,
    -> `some_text` varchar(222) default NULL,
    -> PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
    -> ) ENGINE=MERGE UNION=(xyz_2007_01,xyz_2007_02,xyz_2007_03) ;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.08 sec)

mysql> select id, report_dt, acct_id 
    -> from xyz_mt 
    -> where report_dt ='2007-02-17' 
    -> and acct_id = 'X0000741';
ERROR 1168 (HY000): Unable to …

Its a rare day where I can get HP, IBM, Oracle, Solid, and Google in a room to talk about our storage engine API. Especially when it is several VP's, Directors, and Senior Engineers.

Today is the day :)

We are spending a day at Google, thanks to Chris Dibona, going over the API. It was a great time to get everyone together since thanks to the User's Conference everyone was in town.

No NDA's, just engineers talking about code!

While I'm being insane...

CREATE TABLE housing ...
 ENGINE=FEED
 CONNECTION="http://seattle.craigslist.org/hhh/index.rss";

SELECT title FROM housing WHERE ...;


I think I can get it working with a week or less work.

I thought of doing this at the Yahoo Pipes talk at the Vancouver PHP conference a few months ago, but dimissed it as a joke. I thought of it again at Pasha Sadri of Yahoo's final keynote yesterday. This time, I know that I can do it, but I don't know if I can dismiss it as a joke.

Is this a great idea, or a sick one?

LinuxWorld has a good (and flattering :-) post on Alfresco and the rise of open source Enterprise Content Management that is faster, more usable, and a heck of a lot cheaper than traditional proprietary ECM.

But ease of use should not be underestimated as a key driver in Alfresco's, and other open source applications', growth. Who cares about technology that no one knows how to use?

Terry Barbounis, CTO at the Christian Science Monitor, answers:

Content management technology, in general, has been something to be desired for sometime now, Barbounis says. “Systems are just not easy enough to use and as a consequence customers either don't use them or get little value from what they do,” he says. “ECM when properly leveraged can stretch …

I'm probably insane.

Writing MySQL Plugins
by Mark Atwood, et al

I predict a number of co-authors.

Thanks to everyone who attended the talk in person.

The slides used in the talk is available at ZRM for MySQL wiki

If you have questions or comments, please send them to me.

Looks like our blog has turned into a MySQL blog over this week, so I have to do something about it. Luckily, I have zillions of pending posts, so I’ll start with posting my presentations materials from this conference with my remarks on how it went in general. On Monday, I was presenting about Oracle 10g [...]