Today, a few days later than originally planned and after 91 days in beta testing, the new version of XAMPP for Linux and Windows is ready for downloading. The major updates in this version are PHP 5.1.2 and 4.4.2, MySQL 5.0.20, eAccelerator 0.9.4 and phpMyAdmin 2.8.0.3.

Find more details on the specific XAMPP project page.

What an informative session. One of my favorites at the conference.

I am sitting in the session Speeding-up queries by Timour Katchaounov.

Query engine principles

What's new in the 5.0/5.1 engine?

Query engine architecture.
A number of stages in the query engine happen in the parse tree. This is where the SQL standards compliance happens. Access rights are also checked here in Preprocessor. Then we are ready to execute the query in the optimizer.

First are the logical transformations, then cost-based optimization and then plan refinement. Once we have a complete query execution plan, it is sent to query execution component. It uses either table scan or the index scan etc and decides on the various join methods such as nested loops join, hash join etc. Then its passed to the handler API which uses the appropriate storage engine (InnoDB etc).

MySQL …

This is the first official post in my new category: MySQL Tips. Feel free to subscribe to the category-specific RSS feed, if you prefer.

First, for a bit of background information…

In MySQL, access is always granted based on the combination of username and hostname (or IP address, in some cases), and password—for example, jcole@foo.example.bar could be a valid username and hostname combination. As far as I know, this is a historical thing—MySQL authentication is based on username and hostname because it has always been that way.

In order to verify the “network credentials” of the connecting client, MySQL uses a “double reverse-DNS lookup” on the IP of the incoming connection. In short, MySQL first finds out …

I heard Cory Doctorow about a week ago (yes, we have cool international speakers here in Melbourne all the time!), and if there was only one thing you’re really meant to take away from his talk, I think I found the gem.

Cory signs a book

We’re usually told content is king. He says thats a myth. Have you seen the six trillion dollar industry, that is telecommunications? (okay, I don’t know if that stat is remotely correct…) So the content is king idea is bollocks. What is really king is community and inter-personal communication. Getting people to talk about it. Humans are terribly social beings, so yeah, go community.

“Trying to kill MySQL by acquiring open source is like trying to kill
a dolphin by drinking the ocean.” — Marten Mickos

And yes, that quote ties in well with the …

As I mentioned previously, I’ll be reporting on the conference swag along with the sessions at this year’s MySQL User Conference.

The first candidate? The SCO Giant Pen

Check it out!

There are over 1600 people registered for the conference, a record for the conference (this is the 4th year)!

“It’s fun to be a bus driver when the bus is full” says Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL. 1 billion in hte ‘net, 2 billion with a mobile phone, so there’s a lot of connectivity out there. 6.6 billion people in the world, so 15% are online (1 billion). And there are 20 million MySQL downloads per year, with 1/2 that remaining active. So what happens when the online population doubles?

Corporations are doing the same thing consumers are, and adopting for enterprise use. Corporate functions are hosted or put on-premise, because of the consumer experience (ie, google search).

Humans tend to overestimate the short term, and underestimate the long term. The internet has risen slowly since the bubble burst (which was the “hey, the short term isn’t meeting our expectations!”), and we’ve underestimated that. …

So, we had a really good Cluster BOF last night. Started at 8:30 and at 11pm everybody was tired enough to go to bed :)

Healthy mix of people with deployed clusters, prototype clusters and even some who have looked at MySQL Cluster in the past, decided it wasn’t for them at that point in time, but are still interested enough to show up to the BOF.

It was really freeform (as in I got up and said “there is no agenda for this - what do we want to talk about?”).

We got some really valuable feedback about what people like, dislike and even did hands-up polls of “what do you want us to do first?”. Also got some good suggestions on what to tweak (small fixes) to make people’s lives a lot easier.

The room was pretty well populated as well. my guess was half full (which means nothing until you see the size of the rooms. i’ll try and get a photo at some point).

The consensus at the end seemed to be …

Our partners Solid Information Technology have joined our Certified Engine program and will be making available an open source engine that plugs directly into MySQL.  Solid brings robust OLTP database expertise and their system has been proven in telecommunications and finance for many years.

Solid is showcasing their new engine for MySQL at the MySQL Users conference booth 510 and will also have a presentation at the conference on the technology.   The picture above was from our offices in Cupertino (coincidentally MySQL and Solid are in the same building) when Paola Lubet, VP Marketing from Solid, joined us to celebrate the availability of their new engine.

I love our IT guys. One call to the Cupertino office and one of the IT guys drove to the conference center with the discs needed to reinstall Windows and Office.

I’m now getting everything patched and ready to deliver my session on Managing Hierarchical Data. Sadly there is no recording of the Sakila session because I had to deliver it on a conference-provided PC.

Lessons learned:

Do not sit near high voltage lines and work on your laptop. The only explanation I have for the issues is that I sat near a thick power cable for the lights during the keynote, perhaps it was not well shielded and corrupted files.

Keep your slides in at least three places. When I left I copied my slides from my desktop to my laptop and also to a keychain drive. When my laptop failed I was annoyed but did not panic because I was able to simply insert my keychain into the dekstop provided in the session room and deliver my …

Kai Voigt was making jokes about the secret MySQL underwear. Carol made it real: From the Sakila's Secret Shop we bring you the MySQL Boxers ($10, Cash only).