So, I’m at the MySQL Users Conference. I ran into Jay Pipes and Mike Kruckenberg yesterday. That was not surprising. Surprising was the fact that Mike Hillyer (of sakila sample db fame, which I am very interested in) found me and said “Hi”. I can’t wait for his talk on the sample database; I want to run out and rewrite all the documentation using the sample db. I was introduced to Colin Charles as well, who congratulated me on the success of the Boston MySQL Users conference.

This morning I sat down for the keynotes and Roland Bouman said, “Sheeri!” He was followed by Markus Popp, …

Tuesday morning's keynote at MySQL UC 2006 is a conversation with Kaj Arno (VP community relations), Monty Widenius (founder) and David Axmark (founder). The conversation is somewhat informal, Kaj asking questions from a card and being spontaneous with responses.

The storage engine architecture started with Money being lazy becase he had some data in one format but was having to move to another data format and didn't want to migrate the data.

What is Falcon? It's Swedish beer. It's also a new storage engine from MySQL that uses memory in a new, and significantly improved way. Monty is working on Falcon in a more development role than he's done for awhile. He's also working on a new version of MyISAM that will be ACID, have much faster indexes, and include data warehousing features. There are a bunch of other new storage engine ideas. Monty's favorite new storage engine idea is …

Last night, I attended Mike Zinner’s presentation of MySQL GUI’s, most specifically MySQL Workbench. In summary I was very impressed with the current work, and the future potential. I’ve been waiting for now about a year to get access to full strength MySQL Workbench (it has been available for some time, but still in early development), having previously used DB Designer for MySQL Data Modelling. One of the limitations is finding a quality tool that runs under Linux. Well MySQL workbench will satisfy this and far more in the future.

A quick summary of some of the glossy features.

• Reverse Engineering of schemas from multiple input sources including MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server.
• Synchronisation with a MySQL Database.
• Quick Re-Synchronisation.
• Full GUI tools and features for creating and maintaining database …

The morning keynote session (at MySQL UC 2006) starts with some business from Arjen. Interesting to note that when he askes for a show of hands from people who are here for the first time there were a lot of hands. I'd guess 25% of the folks attending this morning raised their hands. Also a lot of folks who are back for their 2nd year.

Kaj Arno says registration is over 1500 attendees, pretty good. That's close to the numbers for OSCON just a fwe years back.

Yesterday, at the MySQL Users Conference 2006, Eric Bergen and I held a half-day tutorial on Replication for Scaling and High Availability. It went great! We had about 130 people, in my estimation—a full house!

I’ve put the slides online (2mb pdf, 650k ppt) for everyone interested in the content! Enjoy!

While many people will be blogging about the conference sessions and MySQL features, functionality and sessions, I thought it would be important to raise awareness of the creativity of developers often lost during the product lifecycle.

I met at the Speakers Function last night Jim Starkey, the founder of Netfrastructure, Inc, a company aquired by MySQL recently. At the conference was the official launch of a new transactional storage engine to be included in the MySQL 5.1 release is codenamed “Falcon”.

Too often, the flare and creativity of products, and also the initial history is lost when it reaches the marketing department of an organisation. In this case, after talking with Jim, we decided it was important to ensure the name “Falcon” remains. Why should the name conform to something generic, and quick frankly boring. So please join me.

Save The Falcon!

Last week I did a podcast on trouble shooting MySQL, it was done in conjunction with Splunk so it has a bit of information about them as well.
You can find both the written text, which I have not checked for accuracy, and of course the audio:

http://www.splunk.com/index.php/articles/news/311

And yes for those who know me, I really should just set up one of my own.... I just need Eric to get back in town to be the bartender.
Since you need a bartender right?

It should be also noted that showing up can win you stuff. Mikal did a survey thing ore something and his name has been flashing up on the screen saying he’s won stuff. Don’t know if he knows yet :)

I’ve been working on a new project to fulfill a specific need: consistent, fast, cheap, and flexible backups for MySQL, for all storage engines1. To that end I’m creating a tool called dbsnapper—a plugin-based backup tool. The tool itself is very basic and handles a few jobs: getting configuration information from the user, running through a “run sheet” of different configurable tasks, and reporting status and errors to the user.

The tasks then—the actual backup steps—are fully configurable, via plugins. In fact, the whole process isn’t even MySQL specific, and can potentially be used for PostgreSQL2 and other database as well. Remember the requirements for backups (above):

• Consistent—We need to do some locking inside MySQL to make sure that the backups are consistent, for both MyISAM and InnoDB tables. This generally means the FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK command.
• Fast—There …

“Not good to hear Monty arguing with Brian…”