No, I refuse to use "blog". I shall say "web-log" because I don't think it deserves a new space in my dictionary. Goin' Out West is a tune by the inimitable Tom Waits.

I intend this as a diary for my life at MySQL AB, instead of using my personal site. I don't claim to represent MySQL (hereinafter dubbed Johan Company) in any official capacity.

My name is Chad, and I started with Johan in February 2006. I think it's the best job ever. I've used and written Free Software since discovering it in the middle of the '90s, and mysql was the first SQL database I used. I visited PostgreSQL-land for several years, and still have several instances running.

It's not that I don't think mysql is good enough to adopt everywhere. No software is perfect, but as of the middle of this year, I think the 5.0 version of mysql is good …

I recently attended the MySQL Camp 2006 un-conference at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. This article is a high-level overview of the event. If you didn’t go, you really missed something good. Go to the next one! The event The event brought together the MySQL community in a distinctly un-conference setting, to gather in groups to discuss or hack on something, rather than sitting in chairs with donuts and coffee listening to someone show Powerpoint slides branded with corporate logos.

Looks like MySQL Camp 2006 was really interesting and useful for its attendees and for entire MySQL community. As the result of this meeting of many MySQL-related professionals we’ve got lots of interesting publications and I want to refer one of them in this post. Very interesting list of 84 MySQL performance tips has beed created on first day of this year MySQL Camp at Google headquarters:

1. Index stuff.
2. Don’t Index Everything
3. Use benchmarking
4. Minimize traffic by fetching only what you need.
   • Paging/chunked data retrieval to limit
   • Don’t use SELECT *
   • Be wary of lots of small quick queries if a longer query can be more efficient
5. Use EXPLAIN to profile the query …

The final day of the MySQL Camp quotes. See also Day 1 and Day 2.

“Patches on Patches on Patches.” — Jeremy in his Query Profiler patch talk.

“I bagged Jeremy, no I mean I bashed Jeremy and all I got was this badge.” — Sheeri

“You have an enum of ‘Red’, ‘Blue’, and ‘Yellow’, and what is the result if you add 1 five times to the value of the enum.”
— Brian Aker Quiz question. The answer is Blue, and the winner was Taso. Why. You will need to do the certification example, or email me and I’ll tell you.

“High bandwidth opaque identifier” — Chuckie talking about his Unique Internet Id

“So you have until the end of lunch to work out how to start the Instance Manager” — Brian Aker on …

Well, I have a lot to say about MySQL Camp, but for now, I just want to say thank you to Jay Pipes for organizing the Camp, and to Google for hosting and feeding us, and to MySQL for support.

I have a few lost and found items — if you lost or found something, please contact me by e-mailing me at awfief@gmail.com and I will see to it that you get your item back, or that found items get to the right place.

LOST:
white 4-port USB hub

FOUND:
a charger (looks like it’s for a phone, it’s small-duty)
small stack of Avery blank printer sheets, for file folder labels
Sunglasses

If you ended up with something that’s not yours, or are missing something, contact me and we’ll do as much as we can to get items to their owners.

Well, I have a lot to say about MySQL Camp, but for now, I just want to say thank you to Jay Pipes for organizing the Camp, and to Google for hosting and feeding us, and to MySQL for support.

I have a few lost and found items — if you lost or found something, please contact me by e-mailing me at awfief@gmail.com and I will see to it that you get your item back, or that found items get to the right place.

LOST:
white 4-port USB hub

FOUND:
a charger (looks like it’s for a phone, it’s small-duty)
small stack of Avery blank printer sheets, for file folder labels
Sunglasses

If you ended up with something that’s not yours, or are missing something, contact me and we’ll do as much as we can to get items to their owners.

Zimbra hit the front page of the Wall Street Journal on Monday.  Normally a CEO doesn't make front page of the Journal until he does an IPO or goes to prison. Satish, well done!  This is even better than Scott's bobblehead doll! 

I've been a big fan of Zimbra for a long time.  They've continued to invest in building out a great product line with the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) a highly scalable open source email and calendaring suite that now has more than 4 million mailboxes under subscription with customers like H&R Block, Raytheon, ZipRealty, Interim Healthcare and others.

…

I was pretty busy last month with project which will be annonced very soon (I hope), but I can't miss bug fix
of my favorite bug 15815. I wrote about this problem before and also investigated in my presentation.
Finally bug fix was pushed into 5.0-bk tree and now I have it in my hands.

Let me refresh results with MySQL 5.0.27 (without bugfix):

select sql_calc_found_rows * from b limit 5;
executes for 20 sec (table b contains ~2 mil rows)

the same query but in 4 concurrent threads:
98 sec
101 sec
103 sec
103 sec

(I am still using 4-CPU box and expecting the …

MySQL AB and NitroSecurity, a provider of high performance and scalable enterprise security solutions, today announced they have signed a strategic agreement to jointly develop and market a database engine for MySQL® based on NitroSecurity?s NitroEDB? extreme performance relational database technology.

I had organized a session at MySQL camp on Saturday on the above topic. I should say I was one of the guilty ones who had slides for the session in an “unconference“.

Brian Aker (of MySQL) graciously stepped in to answer some questions and provided reasons for some of the design decisions in MySQL OnlineBackup. Some of them are:

• Envelope format for backup archive. This would allow backup as well as recovery to continue in case the storage engines failed to do backup or recovery respectively.

• Block size and envelope format will help in handling tape errors.

• Logical backup will be done in case storage engine does not have online backup API …