The conference that many of us just went to is called the MySQL Conference and Expo, but a lot of people don’t call it that. They call it by the name it had in 2006 and earlier: MySQL User’s Conference. In fact, some people say (or blog) that they dislike the new name and they’re going to call it the old name, because [… insert reason here…].

I call it by the new name that some people dislike so much. Why? Because it is a conference and expo, not a user’s conference. There’s no reason to pretend otherwise. The conference is organized and owned by MySQL, not the users. It isn’t a community event. It isn’t about you and me first and foremost. It’s about a company trying to successfully build a business, and other companies paying to be sponsors and show their products in the expo hall. Times have changed.

I’m not saying any of this is bad. Being successful in …

Keith Murphy and his hard-working crew have released the spring 2008 issue of MySQL Magazine. Go take a look — it includes quite a few articles on various topics, even a mention of our upcoming book (High Performance MySQL, Second Edition).

Keith Murphy, mysql, MySQL Magazine

Here’s a rundown of Thursday (day 3) of the MySQL Conference and Expo. This day’s sessions were much more interesting to me than Wednesday’s, and in fact I wanted to go to several of them in a single time slot a couple of times.

Inside the PBXT Storage Engine

This session was, as it sounds, a look at the internals of PBXT, a transactional storage engine for MySQL that has some interesting design techniques. I had been looking forward to this session for a while, and Paul McCullagh’s nice explanations with clear diagrams were a welcome aid to understanding how PBXT works. Unlike some of the other storage engines, PBXT is being developed in full daylight, with an emphasis on community involvement and input. (Indeed, I may be contributing to it myself, in order to make its monitoring and tuning capabilities second to none).

PBXT has not only a unique design, but a …

Day two of the conference was a little disappointing, as far as sessions went. There were several time blocks where I simply wasn’t interested in any of the sessions. Instead, I went to the expo hall and tried to pry straight answers out of sly salespeople. Here’s what I attended.

Paying It Forward: Harnessing the MySQL Contributory Resources

This was a talk focused on how MySQL has made it possible for community members to contribute to MySQL. There was quite a bit of talk about IRC channels, mailing lists, and the like. However, the talk gave short shrift to how MySQL plans to become truly open source (in terms of its development model, not its license). I think there was basically nothing to talk about there. I had a good conversation about some of my concerns with the speaker and some others from MySQL right afterwards.

There was basically nobody there — I didn’t count, but I’d say maybe 10 or 12 people. I …

If you’re at the MySQL Conference and Expo, you can get a free sample chapter of the upcoming High Performance MySQL Second Edition. Just go to the exhibition area. As you go through the doors, take an immediate left and look for the sample chapter on O’Reilly’s table. It’s a rough draft and contains typos and my incredibly crude drawings instead of those that will go into the final book, but it should serve to give you an idea of the book’s depth and scope. Kudos to Andy Oram, our editor, who was able to get these done for us on very short notice.

Andy Oram, mysqluc2008

Today is the first day at the conference (aside from the tutorials, which were yesterday). Here’s what I went to:

New Subquery Optimizations in 6.0

By Sergey Petrunia. This was a similar session to one I went to last year. MySQL has a few cases where subqueries are badly optimized, and this session went into the details of how this is being addressed in MySQL 6.0. There are several new optimization techniques for all types of subqueries, such as inside-out subqueries, materialization, and converting to joins. The optimizations apply to scalar subqueries and subqueries in the FROM clause. Performance results are very good, depending on which data you choose to illustrate. The overall point is that the worst-case subquery nastiness should be resolved. I’m speaking of WHERE NOT IN(SELECT…) and friends. It remains to be seen how this shakes out as 6.0 matures, and what edge cases will pop up.

The Lost Art Of the Self …

MySQL just gave me an award at this morning’s keynote, along with Sheeri Kritzer Cabral (for the second year in a row!) and Diego Medina, for my code contributions to the MySQL community, specifically Maatkit, which makes it easier to make MySQL reliable, fast, and robust. It’s an honor to be recognized. And while I could leave it at that, I’d like to say a word or two more.

The economy, community, and ecosystem that’s building around Free Software can often be very rewarding financially. This is a great motivation; being rewarded for your efforts is one of the chief virtues of a culture of entrepreneurship, along with the idea that to try and fail is just as noble as to succeed. But I find that isn’t enough. If I were only rewarded financially and with recognitions such as this morning’s, I would quickly become bankrupt at a …

There are quite a few business angles you might see only if you’re here at the conference, and you won’t get from blogs. For example, let’s take a look at the contents of the shoulder bags they hand out with your registration. (This is only a partial list.)

• SnapLogic’s flyer gets it right: their system is compatible with “GNU Linux.” Hooray, a commercial company acknowledging the GNU operating system for what it is!
• MySQL Enterprise’s flyer has three big bullet points: MySQL Load Balancer, MySQL Connection Manager, and MySQL Enterprise Monitor Query Analyzer. The first two look like they’re probably built on MySQL Proxy. The last has a visual explain plan feature, which according to an elevator conversation is not yet built. I’ll stop by their booth and see. As you may know, Maatkit has provided a tool (which is designed for integration into other tools) …

I’m at the MySQL Conference and the t-shirts I created for Maatkit have arrived. Come get yours! They are high-quality, attractive shirts you’ll be proud to wear, and they are a nice rich wine-red color.

Harrison Fisk (co-author of MySQL Clustering) got the first one, because he told me that he recommends Maatkit to MySQL Support customers about twice a week. I made sure to save one for Jay Pipes too, because his luggage got lost so he has nothing to wear. Unfortunately, I didn’t make any Maatkit underwear, sorry Jay. Now I know what to do for next year…

…

I spent the day Thursday with some of Kickfire’s engineers at their headquarters. In this article, I’d like to go over a little of the system’s architecture and some other details.

Everything in quotation marks in this article is a quote. (I don’t use quotes when I’m glossing over a technical point — at least, not in this article.)

Even though I saw one of Kickfire’s engineers running queries on the system, they didn’t let me actually take the keyboard and type into it myself. So everything I’m writing here is still second-hand knowledge. It’s an unreleased product that’s in very rapid development, so this is understandable.

Kickfire’s TPC-H benchmarks are now published, so you can see the results of what I’ve been seeing them work on. They …