I presented on Creating Quick and Powerful Web Applications with MySQL, GlassFish, and NetBeans. The key messages conveyed during the preso are:

• GlassFish is an open source community and delivers production-quality Java EE compliant Application Server.
• GlassFish v2 is the Java EE 5 Reference Implementation and GlassFish v3 for Java EE 6. Read complete difference here.
• Java Persistence API makes it really easy to create database-backed Web applications. It even creates MySQL-specific queries, when possible.
• The web-based administration …

I presented on Creating Quick and Powerful Web Applications with MySQL, GlassFish, and NetBeans. The key messages conveyed during the preso are:

• GlassFish is an open source community and delivers production-quality Java EE compliant Application Server.
• GlassFish v2 is the Java EE 5 Reference Implementation and GlassFish v3 for Java EE 6. Read complete difference here.
• Java Persistence API makes it really easy to create database-backed Web applications. It even creates MySQL-specific queries, when possible.
• The web-based administration …

I have moved on to InnoDB: Innovative Technologies for Performance and Data Protection by Ken Jacobs at MySQL Conference and Expo.

With a brief history lesson of inception from 1994, inclusion in MySQL in 2000 and acquired by Oracle in 2005. Most of the work was done by one person. InnoDB is based on sound database computer science using Gray & Reuters definitive text on database design.

Some key points in Ken’s discussion.

• Adaptive Hash indexing for frequent queries on keys.
• In plugin Adaptive Hash is configurable
• Insert Buffering - Deferring secondary index writes
• Fast Index Create - doesn’t requires all indexes to be rebuilt
• Table Compression - Changing the page size

The InnoDB plugin available in …

I am now sitting in on MySQL and Search at Craigslist by Jeremy Zawodny at MySQL Users Conference

Some of the technical difficulties that required addressing.

• High churn rate
• half life can be very short
• Growth
• Traffic
• Need to archive postings, e.g. 100M but be searchable
• Internationalization and UTF-8

Some of the Craigslist Goals

• Open Source
• Easy and approachable
• be green with energy use

A review of the Internals server configuration

• Load Balancer (perlbal like)
• Read Proxy Array (perl+memcached)
• Web Read Array (apache 1.3 + mod_perl)
• Object Cache (Perl + memcached)
• Read DB Cluster …

Opening introduction from Colin Charles got us started. Karen Tegan Padir VP MySQL & Software Infrastructure was the opening keynote.

She comes from a strong tech background and is passionate about open source, the communities and how to make a successful product.

There isn’t a person that doesn’t go a day without interacting with a website or hardware system that uses a MySQL database.

The big news was the announcement of MySQL 5.4 - Performance & Scalability. Key features include.

• InnoDb scalability 16way x86 and 64 way CMT servers
• subquery optimization
• new query algorithms
• improved stored procedures, and prepared statements
• enhanced Information Schema
• improved DTrace Support

More information at …

Part 2 of "Understanding How MySQL Works by Understanding Metadata", presented by Sheeri K. Cabral (The Pythian Group) and Patrick Galbraith (Lycos Inc.). This was a 3-hour tutorial.

The PDF of the slides can be found at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Understanding.pdf.

From the official abstract at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/5682:

We have spent countless hours researching over 1,000 pieces of metadata. In the process, we have learned a lot about how MySQL works, and realized that it was a pretty good learning method.

read more

Part 1 of "Understanding How MySQL Works by Understanding Metadata", presented by Sheeri K. Cabral (The Pythian Group) and Patrick Galbraith (Lycos Inc.). This was a 3-hour tutorial.

The PDF of the slides can be found at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Understanding.pdf.

From the official abstract at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/5682:

We have spent countless hours researching over 1,000 pieces of metadata. In the process, we have learned a lot about how MySQL works, and realized that it was a pretty good learning method.

read more

I find it surprising that in the official Sun Announcement there is no mention of MySQL for two reasons. Firstly, this was Sun largest single purchase of $1 billion only 12 months ago. Second, MySQL’s largest competitor is Oracle.

While the Sun website shows the news in grandeur, the MySQL website is noticeably absent in any information of it’s owners’ acquisition.

On my professional side, as an independent speaker for Sun Microsystems with plans for upcoming webinars and future speaking on “Best Practices in Migrating to MySQL from Oracle”, this news does not benefit my bottom line.

I have been silent on the topic of this year’s MySQL conference, and really, silent in nearly all ways anyway. Today, as the MySQL Users Conference Conference and Expo 2009 starts up, some people will be wondering where I am, so I ought to at least answer that: I am skipping the conference this year.

As my wife can tell you, this is not a decision I’ve taken lightly, and I’ve gone back and forth on it for months and then down to the final days leading up to now. I’ve decided after much internal and external debate just to skip it all this year, including the side conferences and other stuff. Why? The reasons are basically:

• It’s my opinion that the “state of the art” with MySQL has not changed, so I am not really missing much technical content to further myself. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on with Percona and Google’s work, but I largely follow that through blogs and mailing lists and …

I’ve just successfully configured Drizzle with the PHP Extension and successfully retrieve data to present on a web page.

Qudos to Eric Day for his work. I was able to identify a problem with the current tar release, and a quick confirmation on #drizzle at IRC confirmed a fix had already been commited.

I’m looking forward to evaluating WordPress and Drupal, two popular and common LAMP stack applications that run on MySQL, and to provide any feedback to the community for future support of Drizzle.