You might have noticed from my profile picture on this blog, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, etc., that I am a fan of Julian Cash‘s photography.

If you’re in the MySQL community, you almost certainly know his photography, both the “white background” style and “light painting” style. Julian took a bunch of photos of the MySQL community at conferences a few years ago, but the community has changed tremendously since then, and it’s time for a whole lot of new ones! I’ve asked Julian to come to the conference and take a bunch more photos of the MySQL community in his iconic “white background” style at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo …

I have been silent on the topic of this year’s MySQL conference, and really, silent in nearly all ways anyway. Today, as the MySQL Users Conference Conference and Expo 2009 starts up, some people will be wondering where I am, so I ought to at least answer that: I am skipping the conference this year.

As my wife can tell you, this is not a decision I’ve taken lightly, and I’ve gone back and forth on it for months and then down to the final days leading up to now. I’ve decided after much internal and external debate just to skip it all this year, including the side conferences and other stuff. Why? The reasons are basically:

• It’s my opinion that the “state of the art” with MySQL has not changed, so I am not really missing much technical content to further myself. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on with Percona and Google’s work, but I largely follow that through blogs and mailing lists and …

Yum is an extremely popular system to download, install, and update RPM-based packages from multiple repositories. Proven Scaling has launched a set of repositories to augment the existing central distributions’ repositories with packages our customers need for deploying MySQL-based systems. We’ve been working on it for a while, and have had many people making use of it. We are providing:

• RPMs of community and enterprise releases of MySQL for RHEL/CentOS, as built by MySQL and distributed on MySQL.com
• RPMs of community tools such as maatkit and innotop and their dependencies. …

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!

Yesterday, Oracle‘s Ken Jacobs and Heikki Tuuri, creator of InnoDB, have announced the immediate release of InnoDB Plugin 1.0 for MySQL 5.1. I’ve already downloaded it and played around with it a bit. I haven’t had time to do any performance benchmarks or similar just yet. Those will come in due time.

This release is the beginning of two exciting things: InnoDB is now officially decoupled from MySQL release-wise, and lots of new features have been added to this new release. I will come to what the decoupling means in a moment, but first, the major new features in this release of InnoDB (from my …

Just announced at the MySQL Partner meeting as part of the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, CA:

MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model — previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring (and thus code being tested) only in MySQL Enterprise.

As I’ve discussed before, the size of the user base for MySQL Enterprise is much smaller than for MySQL Community. That means these critical features will be tested by only a few of their customers. So, in effect, they will be giving their paying customers real, true, untested code. How is this supposed to work? In addition, this means that they …

We’re hosting the Silicon Valley MySQL Meetup tonight at the MySQL Conference and Expo venue in Ballroom D in Santa Clara, CA. We start at 7pm and run about 2 hours. Come on down!

At the MySQL Users Conference, I mentioned that I had a stored function for computing distance in miles/kilometers/etc. from latitude and longitude. Some people have asked me for it, so here you go.

First, a general function for computing great circle distance from the radius of the great circle, and latitude/longitude for each point:

DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS gc_dist;
CREATE FUNCTION gc_dist (
  radius DOUBLE,
  A_lat DOUBLE,
  A_lon DOUBLE,
  B_lat DOUBLE,
  B_lon DOUBLE
) RETURNS DOUBLE
RETURN (2 * radius * ATAN2(SQRT(@x := (POW(SIN((RADIANS(A_lat)-RADIANS(B_lat)) /
 2), 2) + COS(RADIANS(B_lat)) * COS(RADIANS(A_lat)) * POW(SIN((RADIANS(A_lon) -
RADIANS(B_lon)) / 2), 2))), SQRT(1 - @x)));

Next, we can use gc_dist() to compute the distance in miles—on Earth—by passing in the radius of …

Well, the conference is now over! I had a great time, and met a lot of awesome people. It was awesome, I truly enjoyed meeting many of you, and will definitely see you next year.

I’ve uploaded my photos and presentations for your enjoyment:

• MySQL UC 2006 Gallery
• Replication for Scaling and High Availability (ppt, pdf)
• MySQL …

Yesterday, at the MySQL Users Conference 2006, Eric Bergen and I held a half-day tutorial on Replication for Scaling and High Availability. It went great! We had about 130 people, in my estimation—a full house!

I’ve put the slides online (2mb pdf, 650k ppt) for everyone interested in the content! Enjoy!