MySQL Users Conference 2006, SANTA CLARA, Calif. - MySQL AB today announced plans for a certification program for the many powerful database storage engines being developed for its flagship MySQL database server by third-party partners and the open source developer community. Several industry-leading companies -- including Innobase OY (a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation) and Solid Information Technology -- are supporting the new program by joining MySQL AB in producing open source engines for the millions of MySQL database users worldwide.

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.

I am at the scale out panel where DBA gurus from Technorati, MySQL (Brian Aker), Google and Yahoo! are answering questions about scaling.

Some Windows based sites are storing up to 30-40 TB of data using MyISAM tables. That site is masochist.com (joke)

A question was asked whether the date in database should be stored as formatted or stored as time only and then formatted by application. The answer given was (the room was jam packed so I couldn't see the faces) that optimization like this should be done at the end. At first, you should try to add indexes where ever needed. Once all the indexes have been added, only then we should move with other smaller optimizations.

Power consumption having effect on business as you scale out?
There is power, power per watt etc. Power is huge concern for us (Technorati).

Some CPUs use a lot less power than others. At Yahoo! and Google, power is a …

In having a discussion with Paul McCullagh (the creator of PBXT transactional storage engine) and Taneli Otala MySQL AB CTO after the keynote presentation at the MySQL User Conference, Taneli made the following comment (paraphrased and reproduced with permission).

“I talk about PBXT in discussions shamelessly. The development of PBXT was excellent timing in the MySQL community landscape”.

It was an excellent commendation that MySQL AB management considered so highly the contributions from the community. As mentioned in the opening keynote, MySQL with the Storage Engine API with MySQL 5.1 has great potential to expand what options are available to user of MySQL.

Good work Paul. I like many others wish you the best in your continued development and contribution. …

Just a warning to everyone that I will not be posting many blog entries from the UC today, my laptop is suffering from an unknown issue that I need to diagnose and repair before I can do any work from it.

On the bright side there is a great blogger contingent here this year and there is plenty of content to go around.

Session attendees: I will get content online as soon as I can.

short and simple: ?embedding mysql? and ?practical i18n with php and mysql.?

the i18n talk seemed to go over pretty well, and i only ran a few minutes short. the embedding talk is yet to come, and will run really, really short.

i would recommend the scale out panel instead.

Listening to Stewart Smith presenting details at MySQL UC 2006 about what's new in MySQL Cluster version 5.1. Stewart has a great personality for presentations, entertaining at the same time he covers the technical details. Reminds me a bit of Damian Conway (the Perl guru), and not just because they're both from Australia.

What was new in 5.0?

• engine condition pushdown - 5-10 times performance improvement
• batched read interface
• more metadata objects
• decreased index memory usage
• enabled query cache

New in 5.1 Cluster

• Variable size rows (used to be fixed, even if you specified varchar): Cluster can pack records a lot tighter.
• Online add-drop index: much performance improvement over previous index …

So, I attended the first day of the MySQL user's conference yesterday, which was the tutorial day. Overall I was fairly impressed. Registration was easy, the actual rooms presentations are given in are comfortable, the PA system seemed to work after some initial problems in the morning tutorial I attended.

The conference center seems to be big on retirees hanging around, which I thought was weird. Each room comes with a little old lady, whose job appears to be to read a fiction novel at the door. I really have no idea what else they were achieving. They seemed to be having fun though. I did find it a bit odd that the only drinks provided by the catering staff during the day were acidic, and most of them caffinated. For example, we had choices between coffee, tea, soda water, coke, diet coke, pepsi and diet pepsi. Some fruit juice or even plain water would have been a nice change by the end of the day.

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