The latest from the MySQL community

Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) has worked with news and information leader Reuters to help upgrade the underlying platform for Reuters.com and transform its global news websites to provide next-generation capabilities and news delivery.

Solution Initiative to Be Featured at MySQL Conference April 24
Unisys and Reuters architects will present a case study on the Reuters implementation today, April 24, at the MySQL Conference. The presentation will be at 5:30 p.m. PDT in Ballroom H of the Santa Clara Convention Center.

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've arrived safe, and mostly sound. My laptop battery is just a little bit shorter than the flight from SEA to SJC. The MySQL employees are being subjected to staff meetings and then Mandatory Party, while I get to putter around the hotel and conviention center. Also going on right now in the convention center is a meeting for people with dyslexia, a meeting for regional veterinarians, a "Coin Stamp and Collectables" show (sponsored by eBay), and a bird mart. Apparently, last year it was a convention of workworking hobbyests, which would have been pretty darn cool.

I finished my slides last night, then showed them to Sheeri, who promptly and properly critiqued them to heck and back. I had basically done every bad thing from every bad ppt presentation I had ever been forced to sit thru. So I stayed up and rewrote them into something much more lively. (The key rule of thumb is to but the …

One of the main questions we get at Proven Scaling is “Where do we find MySQL DBAs, Architects, and Developers?”

Next week is the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California. Inspired by the success of our impromptu job board at MySQL Camp last year (although whiteboards with no moderation tend to get messy), we decided to make a more formal job board this year. Something much more prominent, more organized, cleaner, and easier for both employers and job seekers to use. With great thanks to Solid for allowing us to use some of their Expo Hall space, we will have a formal job board in the Expo Hall, which is open April 24th and 25th.

We will have several “wall” panels at the edge of …

"Aw keep my feathers numbered for just such an emergency...."

This is a good time to take inventory, and see what I am doing wrong.

Code The good news is that my code is in tact. I have code broken up into three groups:
code
tangent
mysql

"code" is source code that make up the one shot programs. I need to test something, I need a simple client application... these were on the backup. And if I lost them? No harm no foul. I know from conversations with Tridge that he loves to keep this stuff around, but frankly I can never see any of mine being of use to anyone other then me.

"tangent" these are all of my projects. Everything here that has any value is in revision control, except one project... kept meaning to move that one. Oh well. Its lost, and I can probably write it better the second time (a good 40 hours worth of coding... grrr...).

…

Few!  After a long trip (10 hours flight) I’m spending all the time left on preparations for my talks on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Hard work.  You know, like going to a basball game, watching the San Francisco Giants beat the Arizona Diamondbacks with a nice homerun by Barry Bonds.

Zito, the other Barry, pitched a really nice game to help win the game with 1-0.
Aside from all that fun, from an geek viewpoint, I think the video screens in the ballpark are simply awesome.

Until next time,

Matt

Even though MySQL is used to power a lot of web sites and applications that handle large binary objects (BLOBs) like images, videos or audio files, these objects are usually not stored in MySQL tables directly today. The reason for that is that the MySQL Client/Server protocol applies certain restrictions on the size of objects that can be returned and that the overall performance is not acceptable, as the current MySQL storage engines have not really been optimized to properly handle large numbers of BLOBs. To work around these limitations, these projects usually just store a reference to the object (e.g. a path name in a regular file system). This approach works around the limitations applied by the MySQL Server, but results in a disconnection and potential source of inconsistency between the database and the file system content. There was an interesting discussion about that topic on Sheeri's …

Have you taken a look at the MySQL Conference 2007 schedule yet? With just one day to start, I’d advise you to take a gander. So many interesting things, that my only complaint (well, a suggestion) is that I hope that these talks get a video recording and they should be given to attendees via the web. Apple have done this for WWDC, and linux.conf.au did a great job in 2007 to record every session.

Why video recording? Because each block of time, have 8 sessions, in where about 3-5 sessions on average can be interesting. Last I checked, I couldn’t split myself.

Sure the slides will make it online eventually, but the talk itself is where most interest really is at, I believe.

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 …