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

So, first two days of mysqlconf’07 are finished now. What can I say is that without any doubts: It worth it! If you’re working on some high traffic projects, some high-loaded database driven systems, etc, you definitely should attend such conferences - you’d never be able to get such big amounts of information from the best people in the industry as you can get here.

I’ve been attending mostly practical MySQL scale-out sessions and BOFs and I’ve got really controversial impressions. No - everybody was great, controversial thing is my own level - I never before was so sure that I know nothing at all! I see people here for which most of new things for me (especially in MySQL scaling) are pretty obvious and it is hard to keep myself from some kind of self-beating because I don’t know these things.

Interesting thing happened today - I clearly realized why YouTube guys got their billion and we or someone else didn’t - IMHO - …

?What ever advice you got, keep it to yourself, your not the target market.”

Red Hat & One Laptop Per Child UI Designer to bunch of suits - MySQL Conference 2007

I have just completed my presentation at the MySQL Conference 2007 on MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers.

Not mentioned in my slides, but referenced during the presentation was what I consider the most important page to document from the MySQL Manual — 5.2.1. Option and Variable Reference

You can download a PDF copy of my presentation here.

Moving into the user sessions on the first day at MySQL Conference 2007, I attended Building a Vertical Search Engine in a Day.

Some of my notes for reference.

Web Crawling 101

• Injection List - What is it seed URL’s you are starting from
• Fetching the pages
• Parsing the content - words and links
• Updating the crawl DB
• Whitelist
• Blacklist
• Convergence — avoiding the honey pots
• Index
• Map-reduce — split a large problem into little pieces, process in parallel, then combine results

Focused content == vertical crawl

• 20 Billion Pages out there, a lot of junk
• Bread-first would take years and cost millions of lives

Our third keynote at MySQL Conference 2007 was titled Building the Ultimate Database Container with RHEL, MySQL, and Virtualization by Michael Evans.

The presentation was on Red Hat & One Laptop Per Child. His initial Quote was “Thinking Past Platforms: The Next Challenge for Linux”, By Doc Sears, 2007-04-16 http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000210

OLPC

• A Non profit idea from Nicholas Negroponte.
• Aim is to build & distribute inexpensive laptop systems to primary & secondary school students worldwide.
• Sell to young children in developing countries.

In summary at presentation to Red Hat — “Non-profit, run by a professor, we make hardware and …

Without missing a beat at MySQL Conference 2007, we moved from Marten’s keynote to The Art of Innovation by Guy Kawasaki.

Extremely fun and entertaining. His 10 points.

1. Make Meaning

• “To change the world”
• To a VC, do not say “you want to make money”, that is understood. You will attract the wrong team.

2. Make Mantra

• Not a Mission statement (50-60 words long), but 2 or 3 words.
  • Wendy’s - “Healthy fast food”
  • Mike - “Authentic Athletic Performance”
  • FedEx - “Peace of Mind”
  • eBay - “Democratize commerce”
• Create a mantra — Why do you exist?

If you get stuck try the …