Since I wasn’t able to get to this year’s MySQL UC (employer change caused problems with US visa obtaining and I didn’t get visa in time) I’m really interested in all presentations people are posting after their sessions. I decided to collect them all in one place and would like to share with others - maybe someone will find it interesting to read what people have to say about many interesting aspects of MySQL usage.

So, I’ve created a folder in my Scribd.com account which you could use (and track using RSS readers) to find out what interesting presentations were published. You can use either my account or mysqluc08 folder there. One more possible option to track mysqluc presentations/documents is using our …

• http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/schedule/detail/874
• presented by Charles Lee of Hyperic
• Hyperic has the best performance with MySQL out of MySQL, Oracle, and Postgres in their application
• I suddenly remember hyperic was highly recommended above nagios in MySQL Conference Liveblogging: Monitoring Tools (Wednesday 5:15PM)
• performance bottleneck
  • the database
    • CPU
    • memory
  • IO …

• Damien Seguy of Nexen Services presents
• easiest session of all (phew, that's a relief)
• clever SQL recipes
• tweaking SQL queries
• shows an example where SELECT is ORDERED by a column that is actually an enum.
  • an enum is both a string and a number
  • sorted by number
  • displayed as string
  • can be sorted by string if it's cast as string
• compact column
  • compacts storage
  • faster to search
  • if (var)char is turned into enum, some space can be saved, shows example
• random order
  • order by rand(1) - obviously
  • the integer parameter is actually a seed
  …

• Tom Hanlon of MySQL presents
• monitoring tool basics
  • SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST
  • SHOW GLOBAL STATUS
  • SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES
• basic tools
  • mysqladmin is provided with the server
    • mysqladmin -i 10 extended status: will repeat the same command every 10 seconds. Pipe through grep "and smoke it" (bad pun, hah hah)
    • -r: show only changed values
  • MySQL Administrator
• cacti
  • rrdtool based network graphing tool
  • uses snmp
  • PHP apache and MySQL based solution
  • MySQL plugins, download and install
  • "poller" gathers data and populates the graphs
  • someone offers …

• Tom Hanlon of MySQL presents
• Benchmarking tools
  • mysqlslap (with MySQL 5.1)
  • sql-bench
  • supersmack - Jeremy Zawodny's tool
  • Apache Bench (combined with some sample PHP scripts)
  • MySQL's benchmark() function
  • …

Unfortunately I didn't find any available seats to take notes for this but this morning a very interesting keynote took place. Representatives from 7 large companies mentioned in the title gathered on stage and answered various questions by MySQL's Kaj Arno.

These questions included things like "how many MySQL servers do you have", "how many DBAs", etc. It was a lot of fun, hopefully someone (Sheeri) will edit and post the video soon.

Keith has a nice summary of everything that went on together with the numbers here.

Update: Venu has even better notes here.

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• Paul McCullagh presents
• BLOB
  • invented by Jim Starkey
  • Basic Large OBject
  • Binary Large OBject
  • photos, films, mp4 files, pdfs, etc
• how MySQL handles BLOBs
  • mysql client send buffer -> receive buffer on the server (max_allowed_packet)
  • streaming a BLOB
    • continuous data stream
    • stream BLOB data directly in and out of the database
    • store BLOBs of any size (>4GB) in the database
    • create a scalable back-end that can handle any throughput and storage requirements. Wouldn't need to know in advance how big the database will get
    • provide an open system that can be used by all engines
    • provide extensions for …

• Jay Pipes, Tobias Asplund
• Finding out the number of rows that would have been returned (MyISAM and InnoDB)
  • SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS and FOUND_ROWS()
  • COUNT(*)
  • MEMORY table
  • if query cache is on, then it makes no difference
  • if it's off
    • Memory MyISAM is fastest
    • FOUND_ROWS() is slightly slower than count(*)
  • more in the slides that I'll add later
• quite a lot of humor, these guys are fun
• query union vs index_merge union
  • SELECT … WHERE a UNION SELECT … WHERE b
    vs
    SELECT … WHERE a AND b
  • index_merge wins
• composite index vs index merge
  …

• Phil Hilderbrand of thePlatform for Media, Inc presents
• classic partitioning
  • old school - union in the archive tables
  • auto partitioning and partition pruning
  • great for data warehousing
  • query performance improved
  • maintenance is clearly improved
• design issues in applying partitioning to OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing)
  • often id driven access vs date driven access
  • 1 big clients could be 80% of the whole database, so there's a difficulty selecting partitioning schemes
• partitioning is only supported starting from MySQL 5.1
• understanding the …

• Robert Hodges from Continuent presents
• About Continuent
  • leading provider of open source database availability and scaling solutions
• solutions
  • uni/cluster - multi-master database clustering that replicates data across multiple databases and load balances reads
  • uses "database virtualization"
• scale-out design motivation
  • protection from db and site failures
  • continuous operation during upgrades
• how come not everyone has it already?
• creating identical replicas across different hosts is hard
  • Brewer's conjecture
• trade-offs
  • DDL support
  • inconsistent reads between replicas
  • deadlocks
  • sequences …