OK, there are an absolute ton (24 if I'm not mistaken) Birds of a Feather sessions going on at the UC this coming week. For those of you who like pretty grids, I've made an online grid to go with the MySQL Users Conference list of BoF sessions.

I myself will be hosting the Performance Tuning BoF on Monday along with Peter Zaitsev, and on Tuesday both the All Things PHP and MySQL Forge BoFs. Finally, on Wednesday, I'll be floating in between a number of BoF sessions. Be sure to check out the FULLTEXT BoF on Wednesday night if you're doing FULLTEXT work. Andrew Aksoyonoff, creator of the Sphinx Fulltext Search Engine, will be hosting that BoF as well as being present in the DotOrg …

Each year my weblog gets bombarded with MySQL entries over the 5-day MySQL Users Conference. I've been posting a lot more about stuff happening with the MySQL database lately, but it doesn't compare to the 4-6 entries a day during the conference. Not only that, the entries will likely be more technical than other MySQL posts. My apologies to anyone who doesn't care about the MySQL stuff I post. You may want to put a filter on, or take a break for a week.

For planetmysql readers I'm just not sure how we're going to handle what I think is coming next week. The last year has been huge for the MySQL community. One year ago at this time Mike Hillyer was getting the conference aggregator ready and a few folks aggregated their posts, which seemed like a lot to follow.

Since then planetmysql has grown to over 100 syndicated …

By tim

In this installment, I'll look at specific technology trends as demonstrated by book sales. First off, here's another view of our computer book treemap, this time tweaked a bit to show the hierarchical organization of the category database. As before, click on the image to pop up a larger version.

As you can see, the treemap no longer looks like Iowa from the air, with each category like a farm field of a different size, and its relative health shown by its color. Instead, you can see that the treemap is actually a structure of boxes within boxes, showing the hierarchical organization of the data mart. We've organized the data into six "super-categories" -- Systems and Programming, Web Design and Development, Business Applications, Digital Media Applications, Consumer Operating Systems and Devices, and Other. Within each …

It's probably a nobrainer, but as this is the first time I'm running into this problem, I decided I'd write it down.

I nearly ran out of diskspace on the C: disk of my notebook (running windows there). You now how it goes: I knew I did not have too much space left, but that little...It just couldn't be true. So, I ran a little Windows Wizard to clean up temporary files and such, and the next thing that happened:

ERROR 126 (HY000): Incorrect key file for table 'C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\#sql_474_0.MYI'; try to repair it

Whoamm! The mysql client utility quit running my query. Seems like a temporary table got cleaned up too...
(I'm running an insane query for experimentation purposes).

The good news was that my disk space problems were indeed instantly solved.

Of course, I'm a little bit surprised that it would be possible for windows to throw away …

As predicted, the most popular tutorials at the MySQL Users Conference 2006 are selling out:

• MySQL Cluster Configuration, Tuning, and Maintenance
  
• MySQL Performance Optimization
  
• Replication for Scaling and High Availability
  
• Certification Primer: MySQL 5.0 DBA I

Luckily, we can do some magic and have a few "double rooms" similar to last year. So, you might still get in.... see also the …

I think the marathon is a good metaphor for software development. Not in the sense of an enduring hardship (though that's often true), but in the sense that both represent very tough, but ultimately achievable goals. The analogy is not perfect though; in particular running a marathon is a solitary effort whereas software development usually is not.

I've run ten marathons in as many years, including Boston Marathon this past Easter monday.  My first marathon was ten years ago, when I was working at Borland on Delphi.  That was a tough project, but ultimately very successful.  Delphi went on to generate around half a billion dollars in revenue and is still in use …

Everybody has been writing lately of their likes of sessions and events for the MySQL User Conference, time for my 2 cents worth, with a twist.

I’ll be leaving early tomorrow at 7am (Friday my time), that’s Thursday 2pm Conference time. A taxi, two trains, two planes, and some 21 hours later, I’ll be at San Jose. In time to get a car and head to Davis California, a small town, where I have lived previously. After some catchup, I’m off to Lake Tahoe, (all up about 3 hrs from San Jose), for some R & R, and a weekend of Skiing, starting at Heavenly. No snow in the last few days, but 4 feet in the past week, and a bumper season to date. (The added benefit is it’s much cooler, I’m not a warm weather person, and my current home in Brisbane Australia is just too warm for my liking)

A lazy Sunday afternoon drive back, …

Lukas Smith wrote an interesting blog entry yesterday on his thoughts about the pluggable storage engine API released in MySQL 5.1. Although I did make a comment on the entry, I wanted to elaborate on what the pluggable storage engine layer in MySQL is all about, and what it isn't.

The pluggable storage engine API builds upon the foundation of the modular table handler architecture which allows different table handlers (now known as storage engines) to facilitate the reading and writing of data to and from a storage medium. The reason I say storage medium, and not disk, is that the handler mechanism was designed so that engines could be created that specifically handled the storage and retrieval of data to anything, not just a …