I’ve finished my last of three sessions, finally getting through my hierarchies session. With the laptop failure, speaking just was not as enjoyable this year as in previous years when there were no such concerns to distract me from giving the audience a good session.

The Hierarchies session seemed well received, with the room packed and audience members up against the back wall. I do wish I had not been opposite the Second Life session, as I was quite interested in how they scale.

Materials

Managing Hierarchies

Sakila Sample Database - …

talk by Roland Mallmann

MaxDB is older than I am, in 1977 started at University of Berlin. Owned by SAP today. Today it’s open source under GPL, or commercial license from SAP or MySQL AB.

Why Max DB is so great:
Low cost of ownership
Few config parameters
no size estimates for indvidual db objects

no reorg — space management done automatically — space no longer needed is returned immediately to the db, data occupied vs. free (holes) ration is highest as possible. This is done by matching logical pages to physical on disk with the Converter, and I/O and space management.

Space management done automatically
No reorganization is needed (ie, OPTIMIZE TABLE)
Gaps are not allowed, therefore updates and deletes are in place, and sorts happen AFTER an insertion.
Space freed is immediately returned to DB
Done by Converter, matches …

A Wednesday afternoon presentation at the MySQL Conference was MySQL Migration Toolkit by Mike Zinner from MySQL AB.

In summary, the Migration Toolkit currently provides the following feature set.

• Wizard like interface
• Plug-in architecture
• Migration of Oracle/MS SQL Server/MS Access/Generic JDBC Data Sources. 2006 support for Sybase and DB2.
• Provides user support to expand to other databases
• Customisable the produced wizard scripts at any step
• Completely Scriptable (the wizard interface can produce command line replay scripts) -allows re-running, re-scheduling
• Binaries include an Eclipse Java Project to enable easy extension of the Migration Toolkit.

The product is built on the Generic Runtime …

I was told that teams had to have a physical instantiation of a mascot, so I said, “maybe I’ll knit something.” Well, I didn’t knit something, but I did hand-craft an origami butterfly for Team Prokrasti Nation’s mascot:

(click picture for larger image).

Oh, and I won a fun game from O’Reilly for submitting speaker evaluations.

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...