The latest from the MySQL community

Here are some notes from the MySQL Server Roadmap session at the MySQL Conference 2007. MySQL: Past and Future 2001: 3:23 2003: 4.0 UNION query Cache Embedded 2004: 41. Subqueries 2005: 5.

Google (likely thanks to the good work Chris DiBona is doing there) continues to build momentum behind its open source activities. Its most recent contributions involve MySQL. I'm not geeky enough to understand their significance, but I appreciate the motivation:

Google uses the MySQL open source relational database internally for some applications that aren't search related. And its engineers are keen to improve the code by making their improvements publicly available.

"We think MySQL is a fantastic data storage solution, and as our projects push the requirements for the database in certain areas, we've made changes to enhance MySQL itself, mainly in the areas of high availability and manageability," said Google engineer Mark Callaghan in a blog post.

I like to see this kind of voluntary contribution - Google clearly …

Back in late 2006, MySQL AB decided to split (or “fork” for the more common open source term) their source code and release structure into two parts: “Community” and “Enterprise”. This has caused quite a lot of stirring in the MySQL market, and a lot of confusion about what exactly the difference is and how the release structure works. It’s actually not easy to really explain the new structure, and I won’t try here. The key point for the purposes of this discussion, is that MySQL is effectively no longer providing builds (binaries) of their community releases, and they don’t provide enterprise builds at all to the public. They are providing source releases of community, but fairly infrequently.

This is a big problem, because it means that there is no realistic way for the average developer or MySQL user to get regular builds (and ones that quickly address bugs) without …

My talk was right after the PBXT storage engine talk. PBXT is darncool, it looks to be a leading contender for fast localstore nearly transactional data with lots of blobs and varchars. I was taking lots of notes, especially his "gotchas for storage engine developers" and his "streaming blobs" ideas.

Then a whole bunch of people came in for my talk, almost filling the room. There were a few startup problems with the projector and the mike, and we were off.

Unfortunately, I was scheduled opposite a talk on "Highly Available MySQL Cluster on Amazon EC2", which was annoying because I wanted to go to their talk, they wanted to come to mine, and there were likely a lot of people who wanted to go to both.

It …

Starting out bright and early again. I have a feeling Martin and Yannick might gang up on me for waking them up so early every morning and making sure we are on our way at 7am sharp, but it’s worth it. We did make it here for the keynotes. The first session was Freedom Businesses [...]

A Storage Engine for Amazon S3, Mark Atwood

It looks mighty interesting, as transfers to Amazon S3 are free. I think it’ll work well in America and places where bandwidth rocks, but I don’t see this working too well in Australia. Oh how I wish the Internets will improve.

Mark has got all his stuff online at A MySQL Storage Engine for AWS S3. He was also kind enough to upload most of the notes, which made my reporting easier, and don’t forget to view the presentation.

Traditional storage engines use the local disk.

Networked engines: Federated, ODBC, HTTP, MemCacheD and S3 storage engine.

What is S3?
…

So, probably like lots of people - i run a few web apps locally that I use for various purposes. In my case, this also includes some cool custom developed things.

I also use Zeroconf to easily discover all this foo around a network.

I run my critical mysql install by hand - it’s not constantly up. This is so, as somebody noticed (during Eben’s keynote at the MySQL Conference where he talked a lot about privacy) that one of the apps i run is entitled “tax”.

Since I’m somewhere other than at home, my mysql instance was stopped (much harder for people to grab the data out of it if the process isn’t running to begin with).

So yeah… good points - check what random people out on the network may have access to on your laptop - and know what you should not run as default (I’m careful there).

As some of you may now, I’ve been on the Bay Area for 10 days now, and I’m getting used to this. I took part on an Advanced Bootcamp last week to be able to deliver some new MySQL courses at Warp

I don’t have much pictures from the conference (I actually have a lot, but most of them are blurry or with bad lighting), but here’s a little sample from my last week.

MySQL Instructors at the Bootcamp

Mårten Mickos (CEO of MySQL) and Guy Kawasaki (VC and blogger) on stage at the opening Keynote

I’ve always been a big Flickr fan, and user, and love them even more now that their 2GB limit is gone. So this was a most interesting talk, and I think photographers and Flickr users alike will find it interesting what’s behind Flickr. Dathan also has a very interesting blog.

Federation at Flickr: Doing Billions of Queries Per Day, Dathan Pattishall

Database guy - query, performance, troubleshooting, application building, etc. Previously worked at Friendster in 2003.

Master-Slave lag - unable to keep up with the demand that Flickr was having. So they have multiple masters, the had multiple single points of failure (SPOF).

Everything had to be real time. Write intensive, so more than 1 master needed. No more slave lag. Serve pages fast, with many queries. Get rid of the SPOFs and be redundant.

Need ability to make live …

Yesterday my talk about "Scaling the world's largest photo blogging community" went very well and I couldn't be more happier. There were a lot of questions from the audience at the end which made me really happy as it was a clear sign that my presentation wasn't flying over their head :)

Thank you to all those who attended. I will be posting the slides to my talk later tonight (it sucks that blogger doesn't has file upload).