As a member of the Boston MySQL meetup I recommended to Sheeri (group organizer) that we try to get Jim Starkey, the author of the MySQL Falcon storage engine (or more accrately the database that will become Falcon) and recent MySQL hire, to come speak at a future meetup. Why? He lives in New Hampshire, within reasonable drive from Boston. Wouldn't that be cool, to have Jim Starkey giving a MySQL meetup session in Boston?

I finally bumped into Jim this morning at the MySQL UC and had a chance to talk with him. The initial conversation was about the meetup, which he gracefully agreed to come to sometime this summer (July/August). Beyond that was a great conversation about where MySQL is now, where Falcon fits in, and some of Jim's ideas about a variety of things including DBAs, stored …

Formed a MySQL Quiz team
Met all the requirements for the MySQL Quiz
Took a Certification exam

everyone root for Team Prokrasti Nation!

Glad to have the backup presentation completed here at MySQL UC 2006. Was a decent gathering, not packed but enough to make the room feel full. Jay and I tried to take a minimalist approach on the session material in order to be able to keep a decent pace have a good chunk of time at the end for Q/A.

I got some positive feedback from the session from a few folks, a few that were very appreciative of the pace and extra time at the end for Q/A and comments.

Here are the slides in PDF format, probably no reason to put up the native presentation file.

This Monday is the MySQL User Group meeting for MySQL. We meet once a month, and I show up every couple of months. This Monday I will have Arjen in tow, and probably one or more MySQL people.

As is the norm we will be meeting at the Elyian, directions can be found here:
http://www.elysianbrewing.com/Elysian.html

Want to know about these sorts of events? Sign up for announcements at:
http://mysql.meetup.com/31/?gj=sj6

We get developers, users, recruiters, and home hackers at most meetings. Topics are focused on MySQL, and by the end of the night we tend to veer off into topics around other open source projects.

http://www.dolphinics.com/ make this cool SCI socket hardware that can be used with MySQL Cluster (for example, like their example setup).

Their tech provides high performance (350MB/sec avail to the user) and low latency (worst case is like 2 or 3 micro seconds to send 512bytes to another node). So can pretty much kick the butt of gig-e.

We could probably do some really cool stuff with boosting performance (even further) when using SCI with some of the things I have in mind for multithreaded ndb kernel - basically changing some of the ways we do sending and receiving signals and improvements in shared memory stuff.

Big points from the presentation are:

• small messages sent using basic CPU …

I am spending my week at the MySQL User's Conference. This is always an amazing conference for me, since I get to see what our User's are doing, and seeing what their requests are. Their requests then push the work that we will be doing. I end up with a lot of ideas. Ever wanted raw disk access for MyISAM or Archive? I had never had anyone ask before, it is quite easy to do, but I had never considered it. Being at events like this is quite incredible.

Speaking of incredible, I am now listening to the Second Life people explain what they are doing. Its really amazing to see what they have built in the last three years. There are few weeks where I don't hear about them, and while I have made a point of not logging in, I suspect that this will change someday soon.

Did a podcast with Chromatic today, so expect that to be hitting websites at some point.

So much to do...

HackFest B: Creating a New SHOW Command by Brian Aker at the MySQL Users Conference

Brian stepped through the steps for those attending to modify and deploy new functionality in the mysql server. Cool. The end result I would consider for an experienced developer as relatively easy (after avoiding the pitfalls).

NOTE: I wasn’t able to complete this successfully during the session, but I’ve posted this, so hopefully the input and review of others can help in overcoming the current issues. See Outstanding Issues throughout my notes.

Our goal: Produce a new command SHOW CONFERENCE;

The following commands were performed on CentOS 4.2. There may be some …

i just took a few pictures, and only the three that i?ve tagged were worth sharing.

but i like that i caught david in the act of doing what he seemingly does the most at conferences ? taking a picture.

the conference was great, or at least the day of it that i attended was. it?s still on-going, and you can check out planet mysql for ongoing coverage.

These are the slides I have shown at my security talk (Room F at 11.50am today).

Security and the real world (PDF, 1.4 MB):


Continue reading "Security and the real world"

There is a huge market for storage products, backup and recovery, data protection and such. In the open source space, only Zmanda seems to be making any progress with the open source approach to this problem. I spoke with Ken Sims and CEO Chander Kant about their new offerings.

Zmanda network launched yesterday and is offering certified versions of Amanda, and support and services similar to the RedHat network model. The pricing will be much lower and easier to understand than traditional storage software. Roughly ~$50-250 per server or workstation. Linux is the primary platform for the solution, but they will be adding more operating systems to the mix over the next year or so.

Amanda has been out since 1991 so its battle tested already and the company has been pleasantly surprised by the number of people using it. "We think our market is the MySQL market. We're adding enhancements …