Some early notes by Brian Aker on Falcon as discussed at the MySQL Camp.

Falcon is a transactional engine MySQL will be introducing. The first discussions were held about 3 years ago with Ann Harrison and about 1 1/2 years ago, MySQL started taking seriously the possibilities.

Falcon is not an InnoDB replacement. It’s a different way of looking at the problem of how it looks at and manages transactions, and how it’s designed. It flips around the way data is stored. Some points:

• It uses as much memory as possible, like Oracle SGA or InnoDB pool.
• It has a row cache not a page cache for more optimal memory use.
• No locking at all. Jim doesn’t believe in it for concurrency control. It has total versioning.
• Falcon has to keep all changes in memory, so not great for user transactions that may take longer
…

The final day of the MySQL Camp quotes. See also Day 1 and Day 2.

“Patches on Patches on Patches.” — Jeremy in his Query Profiler patch talk.

“I bagged Jeremy, no I mean I bashed Jeremy and all I got was this badge.” — Sheeri

“You have an enum of ‘Red’, ‘Blue’, and ‘Yellow’, and what is the result if you add 1 five times to the value of the enum.”
— Brian Aker Quiz question. The answer is Blue, and the winner was Taso. Why. You will need to do the certification example, or email me and I’ll tell you.

“High bandwidth opaque identifier” — Chuckie talking about his Unique Internet Id

“So you have until the end of lunch to work out how to start the Instance Manager” — Brian Aker on …

Monty gave us a quick overview of next generation of MyISAM. It is set to include:

• New data disk format
• Transaction support
• multi-versioning
• row level locking and escalation to table level locks. (interesting)
• bitmap indexes and new table scanning optimizing indexes with up to 1000x times performance.

No details of time frame were given for delivery, however development is well underway.

What the?

Well this is the inheritance diagram of the Item Class in the MySQL 5.1 Source tree, nicely documented using the Doxygen tool as mentioned by Jay in his presentation at MySQL Camp.

Jay started the Community Doxygen Project on the Forge to improve the level of commenting enabling a better platform for the community to contribute MySQL server code changes.

At this early stage David Shrewsbury is working on fine tuning initial documentation examples for QA and review. You can check out the Status Page of automated commenting conversion.

You can see the present documentation of MySQL 5.1 source …

My new Google family since I’ve now moved to the US. Ronald, James, Michael, Shona and Kynan (front). James has literally been here in the US only a few days more then me, and he has an amazing Day 1 story.

Apparently there are a reasonable number of Australians now working for Google. Another interesting fact is the male/female ratio is 6:1 which is extremely high in comparison to the IT industry and IT related university studies.

So, mid morning especially after having a heavy and late night drinking with new friends in Palo Alto I was seeking at Day #3 of the MySQL Camp a high-caffeine pick me up drink. Yesterday I had a Bawls, and after enjoying it I was a little concerned that when I returned to New York I would not be able to buy it. You can get it at Think Geek but that’s more complicated then a local supermarket.

So after getting a Googler to get me to the cafe fridge we find out that there weren’t any there. No problem, lets just go this way I’m told. So we start a quick tour of the larger cafe area and another set of fridges but no Bawls, we keep walking, no more again. At this time the recommendation is I should try a Rockstar, but so …

Early on Sunday Day #3, I dragged a few willing participants out for a “different photo” based on the umbrellas in each Lobby. It worked out well. Special thanks to Kynan who ran around to other lobby’s to find additional umbrellas. (He is the one holding the white one, and yes, that’s a utility Kilt).

I’ll be uploading more in this series to My Flickr Photos MySQL Camp 01 soon.

You can get a larger copy of image Here.

MySQL Replibeertion was the last scheduled session on Day 2, but not withstanding there was free beer (a lot of), there was a serious side with a Replication Discussion.

One of the first questions by Jeremy was “Are the any big replication users?” to which Sheeri quickly replied “Are you calling me fat again”.

This was a highly interactive session, here are some of the points from the audience.

Some Uses of Replication

• Backup
• Hot standby
• Scaling
• Data Warehousing
  • Slaves are larger then your database
• For no special reason
• Consolidation of multiple sources
• Support for multiple indexes

Issues

• Can break
• replication lag
• bi-directional …

Continuing on from my Day 1 - Memorable Quotes from the MySQL Camp.

“Are there any big replication users” — Jeremy “Are you calling me fat again” — Sheeri

“Only some of us have problems with interruptions.” — Jeremy to Jay

“It really really sucks in production systems.” — Jeremy About Slave management by Master.

“So there are like 12 people here, it must be the CEO’s turn to talk.” — Marten Mickos MySQL CEO

“Kegs and Eggs” — Joel S. Regarding all beer that will still be available at breakfast tomorrow.

“You can fight to the death for it”, Jeremy to his two employees Joel and Justin about who gets to be called employee #1.

“Patches go to employee #1″ — Ronald directed to Joel when a replication patch was coined by Jeremy and …

Our first session in Day 2 of the MySQL Camp was the MySQL Winter of Code, as well as an overview of the QA Pilot program and Overview of the Community Doxygen Project by Kaj Arnö and Jay Pipes.

Starting with discussions on Code Contributions & MySQL Winter of Code

Quality Contributer Program

• More coding happens during wintertime then in summer
• MySQL has less contributions than many other Open Source projects
• Contributor License Agreement
  • We want to award contribution more then nominally
  • We want to encourage contributions in all areas
  • We prefer contributions in certain areas (especially encourage them)

Requirements for Winter of Code

• A signed Contributor License Agreement
• A well-formed proposal …