We spent today working on the last minute details for the mySQL conference. The important things: T shirts, pens, mugs, etc….

Seriously, I’m pretty excited about the conference. I think conferences have transmogrified since the days of Interop and Internet World ‘97-’00 and many have reemerged as events actually worth going to.

Back before the Internet, most people would go to conferences to actually learn about new products, trends, etc. Companies typically sent their best developers and product managers to meet with attendees. But sometime around ‘98, many attendees learned that they could find all the info they needed on the net and didn’t have to send anyone. Attendance dropped, and exhibitors stopped sending their best and brightest. The attendees at subsequent conferences were greeted by nit wits that didn’t know anything and attendance dropped further. The …

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 will give you each session's major ideas instead of writing stream-of-thought notes. You can look at the presenter's slides for more.

Day 0 (tutorials), post 2. (I’m still working on the versioning thing — bear with me.) I snuck into the 5.1 new features session halfway through but definitely well worth it. Lots of new features coming out in 5.1 though Brian Aker admits some of them are not quite production-ready yet, so don’t go [...]

MySQL AB today announced the launch of a new business partner program designed to make it easier for resellers, software vendors, hardware companies, and IT service providers to offer their database-related solutions to the millions of MySQL users worldwide.

A wide range of companies have announced plans to join the MECA program, including: Alfresco, AxisOS, BakBone, BitRock, CodeGear, Continuent, Dolphin Interconnect Solutions, Embarcadero, FileMaker, GoldenGate Software, Hewlett-Packard, Infobright, Ingram Micro Inc., JasperSoft, Logicworks, NetApp, NitroSecurity, Oracle/Innobase, Pentaho, PremiumSoft, Red Hat, RippleTech, SugarCRM, Solid, Sun Microsystems, Talend, Tandem-Forum, Unisys, Webyog and Zmanda.

MySQL AB?s CEO Marten Mickos kicked off the opening day of the 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo this morning with a keynote exploring the phenomenal momentum of open source software as both a disruptive force on the traditional enterprise software industry and a positive communal movement among individual software developers.

Infobright today announced the general availability of BrightHouse Version 2.3 with enhanced support for complex and ah-hoc queries across very large amounts of data.

This article shows the easiest way to audit commands to a MySQL database, assuming all content happens from an application. Now, this will use a lot of storage, and doubles the query load for each query, but it’s useful for when you know you want to capture the information of someone using the application.

The basic premise is simple. Logon to your nearest MySQL server and type the following:

SELECT CURRENT_USER(), USER();

Chances are the values are different. More on this later.

First, create a table:

CREATE TABLE `action` (
`user` varchar(77) NOT NULL default '',
`asuser` varchar(77) NOT NULL default '',
`db` varchar(64) NOT NULL default '',
`query` mediumtext NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Why varchar(77)? Because the mysql.user table puts a maximum of 16 characters for the username, and 60 characters for the …

I’ve been thinking about the query cache since last years user conference. One of the features of the query cache is that it’s completely transparent to client. It achieves this by clearing cache entries for tables as soon as the tables are updated. This makes the cache inefficient for tables that are constantly updating.

While thinking about this also thought about slaves and non critical reads. In a replication setup reads that are sent to slaves expect to get data back that might not be the most current. In this situation it doesn’t make sense to expire the cache for every single update because queries running against the slave already know that they are going to get back slightly old data. I thought, “Why not add a time to live to cache entries instead of clearing them for every update?” So, I did.

I added an option to select called sql_cache_ttl. This option instructs the query cache hold the entry in the cache for …

The value of data stored in LAMP applications is increasing at an exponential pace. Indeed, the LAMP stack fuels an economy of its own - with its own currency, lingo and players. While e-commerce is the clear and present evidence of the LAMP powered economy, the currency for this economy is by no means just monetary. Value is manifested in many factors other than financial gains: personal reputation and legacy, karma points, creativity etc. The LAMP stack fires up innovation by enabling new ideas - you can quickly and cost-effectively prototype a concept which other’s may find bizarre.

User generated content (UGC) is one key currency of the LAMP stack. UGC, even votes (ok, diggs) on other’s UGC store tangible and lasting value. While naming “You”, a proxy for UGC, the Time’s Person of the Year 2006, The Time magazine said: “It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the many …

Due to unfortunate circumstances, Zak Greant is unable to attend the MySQL User Conference this year.

Because Zak is a good friend (and I am a glutton for punishment), I agreed yesterday to take on his talk for MySQL beginners titled MySQL Sandalcamp. It should be a good session for those who are completely new to MySQL, covering the basics of what a database is, how to create, populate and query tables.

So if you ever wanted to see what I can put together in two days while traveling, stop by and check it out (unless you already know how to assemble a SELECT query, in which case you will be very bored).

Next up, my Hierarchies talk on …