Yes, I know there are a lot of software development "top n" lists out there, and many dealing with writing "-[i/a]ble" software (extensible, maintainable, saleable, etc), but personally I wanted to get these concepts that have been rattling around in my brain for sometime down somewhere and hopefully start a discussion around them. Even though this isn't a wiki, I'll probably end up treating this like a living document myself.

For a long time (in software years), I've been maintaining the code base for the JDBC driver for MySQL. I also work very closely with the support team on various connectivity-related issues (JDBC, ODBC, ADO.Net, P-this-or-that, etc.) that our customers have, and have had the (mis)fortune of debugging all kinds of problems in various stacks over the years.

Sometimes we (MySQL) make debugging more of a problem than it needs to be, and sometimes it's just inherent problems in the "stack". Given that I …

I was asked the question today, “How do I show the details of a Stored Procedure in MySQL. The SHOW PROCEDURE ‘name’ didn’t work.”.

The obvious answer was SELECT ROUTINE_NAME,ROUTINE_DEFINITION FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES, given I like to use the INFORMATION_SCHEMA whenever possible. This lead me to think was is the corresponding SHOW command. A quick manual search got me to SHOW CREATE PROCEDURE.

What was interesting was not this, but the list of other SHOW commands I didn’t know. I did not know about SHOW MUTEX STATUS, SHOW OPEN TABLES and SHOW …

Jonathon Coombes recently blogged in MySQL Cluster Certified that he passed the MySQL Cluster DBA Certification as was the first Australian. Lucky for him I passed the exam after my presentation on the second day of the conference. I guess us Australian’s are leading the world!

As Jonathon said it was rather hard, certainly more difficult then the other DBA exams but nothing for an experienced Cluster DBA.

So as one of the last speakers, I finally got the opportunity to hold my talk on PHP6. You can find the pdf in my slides section as always. I was actually positively surprised that the room was fairly full, considering that I had seen several people head off to the airport already. I first asked how many people are still on PHP4 and a fair number raised their arms. Anyways, for some reason I felt that I was not speaking as fluent as I can, so I am a bit disappointed with my performance as a speaker. The slides however are probably the most complete resource for people who want to mentally prepare themselves for PHP6. One note of warning though: During my talk I noted that any of the changes/features listed …

MySQL Conference 2007 Day 4 rolled quickly into the second keynote Scaling MySQL at YouTube by Paul Tuckfield.

The introduction by Paul Tuckfield was; “What do I know about anything, I was just the DBA at PayPal, now I’m just the DBA at youTube. There are only 3 DBA’s at YouTube.”

This talk had a number of great performance points, with various caching situations. Very interesting.

Scaling MySQL at YouTube

Top Reasons for YouTube Scalability

The technology stack:

• Python
• Memcache
• MySQL Replication

Caching outside the database is huge.

It a display of numbers of hits per day it was said “I can neither confirm or deny the interpretation will work here (using an Alexa graph)”. This …

In a community session yesterday at MySQL Conference 2007, I first heard about Dorsal Source. A collaboration between Solid DB and Proven Scaling that allows for community people to upload patches to MySQL, get it compiled across multiple platforms, and have a downloadable distribution available on H/W individual contributors will never have access to.

That’s a great idea. I also hope we get the opportunity to get compiling of patches into multiple versions, as well to get builds of a lot of patches together. Personally, I’m running 3 versions just to diagnose one problem. 5.0.36 with a custom binary change, 5.0.37 so I have SHOW PROFILE, and 5.0.33 so I have …

MySQL Conference 2007 Day 4 started early again at 8:20 am with PHP on Hormones by the father of PHP Ramus Lerdorf.

A very funny man, one of the best insightful talks of the conference (rather scary actually). Here are some opening comments.

• In his own words as Keynote speaker. “I’m here because I’m old”.
• Php 1 from 1994 started after seeing Mozilla in 1993. Because it was just me using it, I could change the language any time.
• In 2005 the code looks like this (in comparison on 1995) — I’m not sure if this is worth 10 years of development
• I wrote PHP to avoid programming
• It’s changed to be more OO because people expect that. Universities teach this.
• Hey, I was fixing bugs in my sleep. Iwould wake up, and in my mail …

MySQL: The Real Grid Database

Introduction

• Can’t work on performance problems until we solve the availability
• We want MySQL to fix our problems first.

The problem

• Deploy a DBMS for a workload with
  • too many queries
  • to many transactions
  • to much data

A well known solution

-use many replicas to scale read performance
-shard your data over many master to scale write performance
-sharding is easy, resharding is hard

- make it easy to run many severs
- unbretable aggregate perfomance

The grid database approach

…

“The web is broken you can all go home now.”

Ramus Lerdorf — Father of PHP — MySQL Conference 2007

Here are some notes from the MySQL Server Roadmap session at the MySQL Conference 2007.

MySQL: Past and Future

• 2001: 3:23
• 2003: 4.0 UNION query Cache Embedded
• 2004: 41. Subqueries
• 2005: 5.0 Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views
• Now: 5.1.17 Partitioning, Events, Row-based replication
• 2007?: 6.0 Falcon, Performance, Conflict detection
• 2008?: 6.1 Online Backup, FK Constraints

2007 Timeline

• Q1: 5.1 Beta, 5.1 Telco Production Ready, Monitoring Service 1.1, MySQL 6.0 Alpha, Community GA
• Q2: MySQL 6.0 Beta, New Connectors GA
• Q3: 5.1 RC, 6.0 Beta, MS 2.0, Enterprise Dashboard beta
• Q4: 5.1 GA, 6.0 Beta

Where are we today? …