The latest from the MySQL community

Yesterday I got to San Francisco, after a 35 hour trip from Spain, where I will be attending MySQL User Conference at Santa Clara. First time in the US

Although the trip was really long, it was an experience by itself. In Madrid, people at the passport control must have been thirsty as they stole my bottle of water. Then, I had a transfer flight in Amsterdam, the capital of legal drugs and prostitution, where before boarding the plane I got asked quite many questions concerning my luggage (who packed it, who owns it, did somebody give anything else to carry, why did I come to Amsterdam, why did it take so long to cross the airport, am I sure of everything I am saying).

But the funniest was when I got to the US. The plane landed in Minneapolis, which I always though to be a II World War battle …

ActiveRecord, by Rabble.

• Rails ActiveRecord is mostly database agnostic.
• Good subset of the SQL standard is supported, so you can migrate very easily (this is what OS X Leopard will do - develop using sqlite on your workstation, then migrate to mysql on the server).
• Integer primary keys, and classname_id foreign keys. Single table inheritance is what really works well.
• What ActiveRecord doesn’t like:

1. views
2. stored procedures
3. FK constraints
4. cascading commits
5. split/clustered DBs
6. enums

• Complexity is best located in the code, not in the database, according to the Rails developers.
• Avoid SQL injection with find. Use an array or let it do the …

I am giving a tutorial ("Real-world MySQL Performance Tuning") at the MySQL conference Monday afternoon. I giving it with Jay Pipes and I think it's going to be pretty fun. We are covering quite ways to think about similar problems (and when we have overlap we often disagree! Talk about getting a "two-for-one"! :-) I did a trial run of my longer version for la.pm a month ago and I think I figured out how to pace the length, but we'll see on monday. It's tricky! I had the 45 minute version down pretty well, but in December I gave a one hour version at the Web Builder conference in Las Vegas and that was too little time for the version I had there to be as fun as it should be.

Uh oh, our tutorial is …

I am giving a tutorial ("Real-world MySQL Performance Tuning") at the MySQL conference Monday afternoon. I giving it with Jay Pipes and I think it's going to be pretty fun. We are covering quite ways to think about similar problems (and when we have overlap we often disagree! Talk about getting a "two-for-one"! :-) I did a trial run of my longer version for la.pm a month ago and I think I figured out how to pace the length, but we'll see on monday. It's tricky! I had the 45 minute version down pretty well, but in December I gave a one hour version at the Web Builder conference in Las Vegas and that was too little time for the version I had there to be as fun as it should be.

Uh oh, our tutorial is …

I meant to post this earlier, but starting today I am on a pretty lengthy tour of the USA. First stop is San Francisco, but only for this weekend. On Monday I will move to San Jose to join up the MySQL User Conference for 3 days. Then its back to San Francisco until May 1st to chat with the fine folks at the local Optaros office. At this point I will fly to Austin, location of yet another Optaros office. Then on the evening of May 4th I will fly to Tampa to spend a few quality days at my parents house in Palmetto. On May 14th its time to visit the main Optaros HQ in Boston. But after only 2 days I am already flying to Chicago to php|tek. On May 18th I am flying back to Zurich. However immediately on arrival on the 19th I am hoping back in a plane to Berlin to celebrate …

Do you want to say hi? Pick up a free bottle opener (I haven’t seen them yet but Jeremy says they are high quality)? Sway my opinion on DRBD? Most of my time at the user conference this year will be spent at the Proven Scaling corner of the Solid booth. I also have the privilege of participating in Meet the Experts “Replication in the Real World” event at the Solid booth during lunch on Wednesday.

The after lunch talk on Business Scripting Languages, by Asuman Suenbuel and Murray Spork was something I found very hard to stay awake in. In fact, I think so did many others, some of whom walked out of the room.

The first half of the talk was filled with SAP marketing spiel, something I think should sincerely stay away from conferences that are tech-oriented. When you hear a word like “SOA”, you already know you’re in the wrong talk. Greg the architect video (link courtesy Leslie Wu), now that was funny. Saving grace, and they do mention the movies are not from SAP. Figures. SOA is like a clothes wardrobe was the other video, with some somewhat hot looking girl - sure, again, saving grace.

Model-driven development (this is not UML - this is more like the Eclipise …

In this episode, we go through how a B-tree works. The next episode will use what we learn in this episode to explain why MySQL indexes work the way they do.

Direct play this episode at:
http://tinyurl.com/36gt7f

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http://www.mysqlconf.com

Quiz to receive a free certification voucher from Proven Scaling:
http://www.provenscaling.com/freecert

MySQL Full Reference Cards:
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At the 2nd Annual Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, about a dozen folk have stated that they don’t want MySQL to be their default database for Rails. I do presume that there might be 150-200 folk that have rocked up, so thats a small portion of the market, I guess.

From what I gather, some people have to integrate with other applications, and having two database backends, probably don’t make so much sense. For example, if you use GRASS for GIS mapping stuff, you’d not want your default web app database to be MySQL, right?

I do sincerely hope to meet them all in the next couple of days, to see what their concerns are, failing which there’s a who’s who in where we can still get contacted with later.

Then the distribution statistics. 40% on Mac OS X, 50% on Windows (ick), and a mere 10% on Linux (lots of OS X users do use Linux).

Technorati …

Chris Wanstrath (ex-CNET, now freelancing) worked on Chow and ChowHound, and thats Ruby and MySQL based, as opposed to PHP which is something they normally use. At last years conference, he arrived still as a PHP programmer. He transformed to a Rails programmer in only a year!

The Ruby SOAP library is really hard to debug. It however, creates methods on the fly, and the library itself is reliable. mocks is a good way to test SOAP, or Mocha.

Microformats - the website is your API. Just use semantic markup, that tell the pareses what information is important. They’re very easy to add accessibility to the stuff that you already have there. mofo (sudo gem install mofo) is a gem to parse microformats. Corkd - another rails site? mofo supports pretty much everything - …