The latest from the MySQL community

This was my reason #1 to attend the UC and it lived up to my expectations!
The Lost art of the self join was a truly enjoyable experience. Beat Vontobel delivered with confidence and humor a talk about a subject that most people would consider dull.
It was a feast for all attendees with an inclination for hacking.

The truly amazing thing in this presentation was not that Beat explained how to solve a Sudoku puzzle with one query which is a truly amazing feat, but that he explained how to use the join mechanism to implement a backtracking machine, similar to a regular expression algorithm.
The presentation was concluded with a live solution of a 6x6 sudoku puzzle. The reason for not using a 9x9 puzzle is …

Watching the MySQL uproar unfold brings to mind an array of random thoughts:

1. Microsoft really should acquire an open-source company. It would get credit for opening up, even if it closed off some parts of whatever project it acquired. Sun...? It's getting lambasted for no logical reason at all. It's not as if MySQL wasn't actively considering tweaks to its model before Sun acquired them, just as all open-source companies do. No one has settled on the exact right model yet.
   
2. While Microsoft and other "proprietary companies" move toward opening up, it would appear that there is some movement among "open-source companies" to close off. Maybe we'll meet in the middle?
   ...

I've been getting pings all morning about my thoughts on the Slashdot article:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/16/2337224

Google reveals my thoughts on crippleware. I've never been particularly quiet on the subject of the "Open Source 2.0" branding cycle of trying to say that a "mostly free" open source project is open source. The entire movement of "mostly free" pretty much disturbs me.

I do not believe though that this subject is cut and dry. I am going to use Innodb as an example. I do not consider it crippleware, and I have been amazed and delighted at Oracle's ownership of it. They have made excellent stewards of the source code.

Do they have a closed source backup tool? Yes.

Do I have an issue with this? No.

Why not? We can use Innodb just fine …

My slides have just been uploaded for the talk I just gave at the MySQL Conference and Expo 2008 titled “Scaling out MySQL: Hardware today and tomorrow“. You can download them now as PPT and PDF.

Thanks for coming to my talk!

Mark started by making the point that when he talks about problems with InnoDB, he's referring to what he calls "blemishes on a beautiful work of art". In an earlier direct chat with him he explained that the InnoDB source code is well structured and documented.

People active on InnoDB are at Oracle/InnoDB (of course), a team (!) at Google, Percona (PeterZ & Vadim), and a few other individuals like Yasufumi Kinoshita (NTT Comware Corp).

A few days ago Oracle/InnoDB released a new version of InnoDB, refactored as a plugin engine, with a number of very interesting new features and improvements.

Mark also advertised some of the MySQL-related service businesses and tools (such as Maatkit), it turns out he's wearing multiple layers of shirts ;-) Indeed, Open Query's "Yes, I will tune your MySQL server." shirt is represented as well. Thanks Mark!
(if you're reading this at the conf, I have some shirts …

Here are the slides and links I am using for the “Database Security Using White-Hat Google Hacking” at the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo.

pdf slides

Where to Start:
http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ghdb.php

i-hacked.com/content/view/23/42

for the impatient

Google’s Terms of Service
Google Operators

More Googlehacks to run:
Page 35 of …

Last night (okay… i’m posting thsi a bit later… so the other night), a group of us gathered around to hear about some work that had been done in getting a MySQL Cluster backend for OpenLDAP.

I’d heard a bit of rumors (where rumors is defined by somebody saying something on IRC and me being busy looking at other things) about this previously, but last night was the first time I a) saw it working and b) saw performance numbers.

Disclaimer: I am no LDAP expert.

So, what is it?

Normal LDAP can replicate asynchronously from one machine to another. You can even update on both and it has some conflict resolution. But… this costs in performance.

Normal LDAP can also replicate (asynchronously) to a remote location for read-only (e.g. make authentication go faster in Australia with the main LDAP server in the US).

The MySQL Cluster backend for OpenLDAP connects directly to MySQL Cluster, using …

• 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
  …

Just a quick note that I have posted the video from my session at this year’s MySQL Conference at:

http://www.mikehillyer.com/video/HowToBeNormal.html 

Scaling out MySQL: Hardware Today and Tomorrow

Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen over at Proven Scaling LLC gave a talk about the hardware side of MySQL. They covered pretty much every aspect of hardware.

For starters, Jeremy said go 64-bit hardware and operating system. For CPU, faster is better. The current versions of MySQL and InnoDB don't take full advantage of 8 core servers, so unless you have the budget, Jeremy recommended a single quad-core or a dual dual-core setup. He recommended getting as much RAM as possible. RAM is cheap so go for 32GB, or at least 16GB.

For storage, Jeremy discussed the many options including direct attached storage (DAS), SAN, NAS, and the various hard drive interfaces. From …