Well, I announced it a few months ago, and now Sheeri made it happen. The MySQL Users Conference and Expo 2009 will have a MySQL Camp embedded.

What is it? Asked most of the people I know, including many colleagues, some of them worried that I was giving away the company jewels.

For starters, it is not a competitor of the Users Conference. It won't duplicate its contents, nor is a way of sneaking into the main conference without a pass. It is a camp, and if you have attended either one of the previous MySQL Camps or the OpenSQLCamp, you know what I mean.

MySQL Camp is a gathering of MySQL geeks, developers, enthusiasts, …

Well, I announced it a few months ago, and now Sheeri made it happen. The MySQL Users Conference and Expo 2009 will have a MySQL Camp embedded.

What is it? Asked most of the people I know, including many colleagues, some of them worried that I was giving away the company jewels.

For starters, it is not a competitor of the Users Conference. It won't duplicate its contents, nor is a way of sneaking into the main conference without a pass. It is a camp, and if you have attended either one of the previous MySQL Camps or the OpenSQLCamp, you know what I mean.

MySQL Camp is a gathering of MySQL geeks, developers, enthusiasts, …

These days I'm working with a customer who has an application based entirely on stored routines on MySQL side. Even though I haven't worked much with stored procedures, I though it's going to be a piece of cake. In the end - it was, but there's a catch.

My initial idea was - I'll just analyze queries in the slow query log generated by our mysql build running with long_query_time=0, get the slowest ones and work on them. It wasn't really all the way I expected..

For a showcase I have created a function "whatstheweatherlike". Let's call it and see what shows up in the slow query log:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> SELECT whatstheweatherlike(5);
2. +----------------------------------------------------------+
3. | …

By Giuseppe Maxia

The Data Charmer, a.k.a. The Wizard, is a free lance database consultant, with a long career in several IT fields. He is well known for his Perl and SQL expertise,although he is proficient in several other languages, such as C++, shell scripts, and Italian.

He has a split personality, one of which lives in virtual space and time, floating around UTC+1. The other (or the others, as there is a dispute about how many they are) is less documented and some people believe it to be fictional. He teaches Creative Biography at the University of Euphoria, CA (also known as Euphoric State).

G.M. Hello, D.C. Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. I'll start with a question that most people ask. Who are you?

D.C. This is not really a question I'm willing to answer. Besides, the answer would be misleading. In the Internet age, I can be several people at …

We've now concluded our call for papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium, which will be open on Sunday, 8th of February from 09:00-17:00.

We received some excellent proposals and I am very excited about the schedule. Here's the quick summary of the talks:

• Vladimir Kolesnikov: Practicing DBA's Guide to the PBXT Storage Engine
• Kris Buytaert: Monitoring MySQL
• Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Cluster
• Roland Bouman: MySQL 5.1 Plugins
• Kaj Arnö: MySQL, powering and using Social Networks
• Ewen Fortune: Percona MySQL patches and the XtraDB storage engine
• Giuseppe Maxia: Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• Jurriaan Persyn: Database Sharding

See the …

This is Zak Greant's weekly report on his activities for the Mozilla Foundation from December 29th, 2008 to January 4th, 2009.

Overview

Another week of the Christmas and New Year holidays with many of my Mozilla colleagues unavailable. As with the previous week, I focused on 2009 program development and engagement.

The program development work was in the form of brainstorming, planning and research for upcoming 2009 Mozilla activities.

The engagement work focused on participating in the Mozilla blogorama. I kept up with Planet Mozilla, commented on blog posts I found interesting and continued a series of lightweight blog posts.

More details on both activities follow:

Program Development

I finished drafting a new statement of work and sent this to …

We've now concluded our call for papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium, which will be open on Sunday, 8th of February from 09:00-17:00.

We received some excellent proposals and I am very excited about the schedule. Here's the quick summary of the talks:

• Vladimir Kolesnikov: Practicing DBA's Guide to the PBXT Storage Engine
• Kris Buytaert: Monitoring MySQL
• Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Cluster
• Roland Bouman: MySQL 5.1 Plugins
• Kaj Arnö: MySQL, powering and using Social Networks
• Ewen Fortune: Percona MySQL patches and the XtraDB storage engine
• Giuseppe Maxia: Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• Jurriaan Persyn: Database Sharding

See the …

I wrote last week about the commercial open source business strategies that I expect to dominate in 2009.

The flipside to that is the commercial open source community strategy. You simply can’t have one without the other, and I expect community strategies will be a hot topic in 2009 and beyond.

Savio Rodrigues wrote recently that “By the end of 2008, virtually every successful open source vendor has a fairly tightly controlled development process and this hasn’t hurt their revenue growth.”

Based on my prediction that proprietary licensing strategies will be increasingly important in the next two years I am inclined to agree with him.

However, I am also …

Percona has been building and contributing to open-source software since the company was founded, and individually we've been doing the same thing for many years.  We think it's a huge value for our customers and the community.

We're involved in a dozen or so open-source projects, but our three core efforts at the moment are the following:

• Percona patches, which are included in our own MySQL builds and then in OurDelta builds and perhaps others as well
• XtraDB, which is our new high-performance transactional storage engine
• Maatkit, which is a toolkit that provides advanced functionality for MySQL.

We have a team of dedicated MySQL developers working on the server …

A (slightly belated) Happy New Year to you! I just returned from my Christmas vacation two days ago, which I spent mostly at home and with my parents-in-law in St. Radegund, Austria. Now I am busy catching up with what has piled up during my absence (I managed to resist the temptation to check my work email during the time off).

Some MySQL-related news that came up in the past weeks and are worth sharing:

• My talk about MySQL HA solutions has been accepted in the main FOSDEM conference track
• The FOSDEM organizers also accepted my lightning talk proposal about Bazaar - it will take place on Saturday, 14h20 (tentative)
• MySQL will have a …