OK, back from the Users Conference, which was an absolute blast (will write about my thoughts on that a little later today). I've finally gotten around to cleaning up two slide decks for my Index Tuning and Coding Techniques for Optimal Performance and Performance Tuning Best Practices. I exported the slides to PDF format so that there were no cross platform issues. Cheers!

By tim

Once Greg Linden had pinged me about BigTable (leading to yesterday's entry), it occurred to me to ask Greg for his own war stories, both at Findory and Amazon. We hear a recurrent theme: the use of flat files and custom file systems. Despite the furor that ensued in the comments when Mark Fletcher and Gabe Rivera noted that they didn't use traditional SQL databases, Web 2.0 applications really do seem to have different demands, especially once they get to scale. But history shows us that custom, home-grown solutions created by alpha geeks point the way to new entrepreneurial opportunities... Greg wrote: There are a couple stories I could tell, one about the early systems at Amazon, one about the database setup at Findory.

On Findory, our traffic and crawl is much …

Finally back home after some R&R at Yosemite before leaving the US. In conclusion, to sum up my experience of the 4th Annual MySQL Users Conference “Excellent”.
Here’s my take. Friends, Functionality & New Features, the Future.

Friends

I’ve used MySQL now for over 6 years, and full time for a number of years, yet I’ve only become active in the MySQL community, particularly Planet MySQL in the past 6 months. Over that time, I’ve read a lot from members, and heard from many people. It was great at the conference to meet many of these people for the first time. The list includes: Community Members - Frank Mash, …

MySQL AB :: MySQL: The World’s Most Popular Open Source Database

The cool thing is I wasn’t the one who noticed it. A holler goes out to Timmeah!

Julian Cash has been taking very cool shots of various people (attendees and employees) at the MySQL Users Conference - check them out!

I totally broke MySQL 5.0.21 :(

Also broke the LSI megaraid driver (this was what all my megaraid whining was about).

and uh, broke eAccelerator, but not as much. Someone else is on the track to fixing it.

It's been a great month for open source software! MySQL is disappointing though. If you open a MyISAM table via an INSERT, there's a high chance the thread will deadlock and die forever (probably only on x86_64 64-bit builds though.). I have a poorly worded bug report up. I'll also be officially filing a kernel bugzilla report for the megaraid problem once I confirm that 2.6.17-rc3 and 2.6.17-rc3-mm1 don't fix the issue.

On the plus side all of my MySQL 5.0 master-master clusters are going up regardless of that bug.

Boring huh?

Next week I'm going to be dorking around with initramfs to …

At the MySQL User's Conference last week we announced our partners of the year:

• BusinessObjects - Business Intelligence software
• Dell - High performance servers for MySQL scale-out
• Oracle - Developer of the most excellent InnoDB storage engine

I think some people were surprised when we announced that Oracle was one of the winners.  But why not?  They are a good partner of ours and a good supporter of open source technology.  We renewed our deal with Oracle around InnoDB with a multi-year extension with the existing terms unchanged. That's good news for MySQL customers and the open source community.

Some of the press gave us a hard time saying we should let everyone know that we renewed the deal with Oracle for InnoDB.  So now we have.

• MySQL: …

The Australian System Administrator’s Conference 2006
It’s interesting that the online registration doesn’t have an SSL certificate that matches. I now have to find a printer to produce dead tree to mail.

Considering that I don’t actually own a printer, this is getting interesting…

P.S. come to my tutorial on MySQL Cluster!

On the way to the airport from Santa Clara (after the MySQL Users Conference) I pulled off Route 101 to grab a few snacks for the plane ride (yea, I don't like paying $4 for a warm soda at the airport). I laughed out loud when the random exit I chose just happened to be the exit for the Oracle Corporate Headquarters (another view). Really, I had no idea. I've seen them before but it was purely random (or subconscious). If you haven't been near them, the series of pods and surrounding campus is pretty cool.

I couldn't shake the irony that after having been immersed in …

At the 2004 Foo Camp, Danese Cooper, a few other FLOSS advocates (forgive me, Foo Camp is a blur and I don’t remember who you were) and myself gave an ad hoc session on the methods and strategies that we each used to advocate FLOSS and to help people working closed environments become more open.

The session was a blast (and well-received), so much so that Danese and I proposed the session for last year’s OSCON. We didn’t make the cut, but I still tried again for this year’s EuroOSCON and, this time, the session was accepted.

The session should be fun to present, but a bit of a bear to write. I have only 45 minutes to try to fit in the most …