So far this is what I am thinking of for sessions for MySQL Camp (AKA
free conference this weekend on MySQL at Google... you are coming
right?).
http://mysqlcamp.org/


1) How to write show commands.
2) Internals to Storage Engine Design
3) How to add new Field Types
4) Scale out with the memcache engine

Any other ideas?

OK, so why the title? Here goes. If you care about the future direction of the MySQL Community Server, you should go to MySQL Camp. Why? Because the people attending (both MySQL employees and community members) are the folks who will most likely influence the future direction of development on the Community Server. You've got Brian Aker, MySQL's Director of Architecture, various MySQL consultants and engineers, like Monty Taylor, JD Duncan, and Brian Miezejewski. Oh, and did I mention that the CEO, Mårten Mickos, and two founders of MySQL AB, Monty Widenius and David Axmark, will also be there? Oh, and a ton of engineers from Yahoo!, Google, Zmanda, …

So last night out of the blue Andy Biao, who started Upcoming.org (now part of Y!) asks me if I am liking backyard. He has been meaning to ask me for awhile because they were looking for a programmer with some ops experience.

Oh well. I really want to do the MySQL thing right now and have fun with it. I want to do something that I both enjoy and am good at, instead of just something I'm good at.

ps: if you are a programmer with ops experience and would like to work at Y! then let me know and I'll get you in touch with Andy.

--Justin

We’ve released solidDB for MySQL Beta 5! We are continuing to make improvements, and as always, we are looking for feedback from the community. What existing features are you using, which area needs improvement, what is your number one most wanted feature? ¶

Features of this beta release include: ¶

• The show soliddb mutex command is now supported
• Pessimistic tables now supported and documented
• Performance enhancements
• New configuration parameters
• Documentation extended
• Online backup supported and documented
• Performance monitoring supported and documented

Bits are available at http://dev.soliddb.com/download/ if you want to try it out. …

There are two excellent conferences going on this week, O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference November 7-9 in San Francisco and the MySQL Camp November 10-12 in Mountain View.  To be fair, I should say that MySQL Camp is really an "un-conference".  It's more of a participative event for hardcore MySQL users and developers than a traditional go-listen-to-someone-speak-and-drink-coffee-to-stay-awake type of conference.  So maybe that's the distinction: if you want to listen, go to Web 2.0, if you want to drive the discussion, go to MySQL Camp.  And there's no …

Yesterday we had our fourth MySQL User Group Meeting here in Hamburg. We had 19 attendees and a very informative talk about Ruby on Rails/Active record, held by Stefan Saasen. Thanks a lot, Stefan! It was quite insightful and we had good discussions and excellent food afterwards. I look forward to our next meeting, which I have already scheduled for February, 5th! So save the date and RSVP!

Some pictures of our meeting are in my Gallery, a PDF of Stefan's talk can be obtained from here. Enjoy and see you next time!

Yesterday we had our fourth MySQL User Group Meeting here in Hamburg. We had 19 attendees and a very informative talk about Ruby on Rails/Active record, held by Stefan Saasen. Thanks a lot, Stefan! It was quite insightful and we had good discussions and excellent food afterwards. I look forward to our next meeting, which I have already scheduled for February, 5th! So save the date and RSVP!

Some pictures of our meeting are in my Gallery, a PDF of Stefan's talk can be obtained from here. Enjoy and see you next time!

We are currently evaluating the consequences of migrating our application from Java 1.4 to Java 5. While initial tests revealed only simple issues (like variables called enum etc.) we are now seeing a much more severe problem: Random VM crashes.

Currently we only see this on Linux (Kernel 2.4) only, however even there we cannot reliably reproduce the problem. On a single machine we have seen two crashes in a week. Notably the application was not being used, it was just started and waiting for user input. Some background threads are running in this situation, however they do not do any work, either. They just poll some database tables for external changes, but there were none.

All of a sudden a VM would crash, leaving a hs_err_pid1234.txt behind. This is what they look like (shortened):

#
# An unexpected error has been detected by HotSpot Virtual Machine:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x402989b9, …

We are currently evaluating the consequences of migrating our application from Java 1.4 to Java 5. While initial tests revealed only simple issues (like variables called enum etc.) we are now seeing a much more severe problem: Random VM crashes.

Currently we only see this on Linux (Kernel 2.4) only, however even there we cannot reliably reproduce the problem. On a single machine we have seen two crashes in a week. Notably the application was not being used, it was just started and waiting for user input. Some background threads are running in this situation, however they do not do any work, either. They just poll some database tables for external changes, but there were none.

All of a sudden a VM would crash, leaving a hs_err_pid1234.txt behind. This is what they look like (shortened):

#
# An unexpected error has been detected by HotSpot Virtual Machine:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x402989b9, …