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.

What is open source, production-quality, supported by a large vibrant community, and comes with full enterprise support ? - GlassFish and MySQL.

Did you know that GlassFish ...

• is the only open-source Java EE 5 compliant Application Server
• can be used to deploy Rails, Grails, and Django applications
• has 13x better price/performance than Dell/HP, and therefore a much lower TCO
• has an easy-to-use and intuitive web-based administration console
• has enterprise features like clustering/high availability, .NET-interoperable Web services, ...

Are you attending MySQL Users Conference 2009 …

What is open source, production-quality, supported by a large vibrant community, and comes with full enterprise support ? - GlassFish and MySQL.

Did you know that GlassFish ...

• is the only open-source Java EE 5 compliant Application Server
• can be used to deploy Rails, Grails, and Django applications
• has 13x better price/performance than Dell/HP, and therefore a much lower TCO
• has an easy-to-use and intuitive web-based administration console
• has enterprise features like clustering/high availability, .NET-interoperable Web services, ...

Are you attending MySQL Users Conference 2009 …

What is open source, production-quality, supported by a large vibrant community, and comes with full enterprise support ? - GlassFish and MySQL.

Did you know that GlassFish ...

• is the only open-source Java EE 5 compliant Application Server
• can be used to deploy Rails, Grails, and Django applications
• has 13x better price/performance than Dell/HP, and therefore a much lower TCO
• has an easy-to-use and intuitive web-based administration console
• has enterprise features like clustering/high availability, .NET-interoperable Web services, ...

Are you attending MySQL Users Conference 2009 …

Like most people, and with just over a week to go before the conference, I’m putting the finishing touchs on my various presentations.

First up for me, on Monday afternoon, is my tutorial: Scale Up, Scale Out, and High Availability: Solutions and Combinations.

What will be doing?

Very simply: Looking at every potential solution for maximum scalability and availability for your database environment.

If you are attending, be prepared to:

• Expand your mind as we think about scaling up.
• Expand your horizons as we think about scaling out.
• Divide and conquer, as we think about high-availability.

We’re not not hands on in this session – but I will expect you to be brains on!