As many of you know, I’ve been working in the MySQL world for quite a while now. IN fact, it was nearly 10 years ago when I first started hacking on MySQL Cluster at MySQL AB.

Most recently, I was at Percona which was a wonderful journey where over my nearly three years there the company at least doubled in size, launched several new software products and greatly improved the quality and frequency of releases.

However the time has come for something completely different. The MySQL world is rather mature, the future of …

For the past many years, there’s been a conference in April, at the Santa Clara Convention Centre where the topic has been MySQL and the surrounding ecosystem. The first year I went, I gave a talk on the new features in MySQL Cluster 5.1 to a overflowing room of attendees. For me, it’s an event that’s mixed with speaking about something I’ve been working on and talking to other attendees about everything from how a particular part of the server works to where we can escape to for nearby good vegan food.

So, I thought I’d share some of the sessions that I’m really looking forward to. My selection is probably atypical, but may be interesting to others. I’m not going to list the keynotes, although they are often of a lot of value. I’m also going to attempt to avoid listing a few really awesome well known speakers simply because there are other really interesting sessions that also need exposure!

• …

At Percona, we’re now using sphinx for our documentation. We’re also using Jenkins for our  continuous integration. We have compiler warnings from GCC being parsed by Jenkins using the built in filters, but there isn’t one for the sphinx warnings.

Luckily, in the configuration page for Jenkins, the Warnings plugin allows you to specify your own filters. I’ve added the following filter to process warnings from sphinx:

For those who want to copy and paste: …

As you may have read on the MySQL Performance Blog post – I’ve recently joined Percona. This is a fairly exciting next step. I’ll be in New York for Percona Live next week, where I’ll be giving a session titled “Drizzle 7, GA and Supported: Current & Future Features”.

I’ll write more soon, there’s a lot keeping me busy already!

A couple of months ago (December 1st for those playing along at home) it marked five years to the day that I started at MySQL AB (now Sun, now Oracle). A good part of me is really surprised it was for that long and other parts surprised it wasn’t longer. Through MySQL and Sun, I met some pretty amazing people, worked with some really smart ones and formed really solid and awesome friendships. Of course, not everything was perfect (sometimes not even close), but we did have some fun.

Up until November 2008 (that’s 3 years and 11 months for those playing at home) I worked on MySQL Cluster. Still love the product and love how much better we’re making Drizzle so it’ll be the best SQL interface to NDB :)

The ideas behind …

Drizzle originally inherited the FRM file from MySQL (which inherited it from UNIREG). The FRM file stores metadata about a table; what columns it has, what type those columns are, what indexes, any default values, comments etc are all stored in the FRM. In the days of MyISAM, this worked relatively well. The row data was stored in table.MYD, indexes on top of it in table.MYI and information about the format of the row was
in table.FRM. Since MyISAM itself wasn’t crash safe, it didn’t really matter if creating/deleting the FRM file along with the table was either.

As more sophisticated engines were introduced (e.g. InnoDB) that had their own data dictionary, there started to be more of a problem. There were now two places storing information about a table: the FRM file and the data dictionary specific to the engine. Even if the data dictionary of the storage engine was crash safe, the FRM file was not plugged into that, so you …

Wanting a quick build-and-play way to get Drizzle? We’re dropping weekly-ish tarballs for the Aloha milestone. The latest milestone also has preliminary GCC 4.4 support

You can see regular announcements on:

• http://planetdrizzle.org/
• http://blog.drizzle.org/ – which is just announcements and the like.

The past 3 years, 11 months I have worked full time on NDB (MySQL Cluster). It’s been awesome. Love the product and people. In the time I’ve been on the Cluster team, we’ve gone from a small group that would easily fit in the (old old) Stockholm office to one that requires large rooms to house us all in. It’s also been all about smart people (you have to be to work on a distributed database).

With MySQL Cluster 6.4 we’re getting in a bunch of features that have been on the “wide adoption” wishlist. With each release of NDB we’ve gained a wedge of applications that can be used with it - and 6.4 is no exception.

One of the biggest things that’s been worked on is multithreaded data nodes. If you check out Jonas‘ recent posts on 500,000 …

It’s like removing the brakes from your car. yes, it will go faster (slightly less weight) but, dude, you just removed the brakes.

So after seeing Paul Fenwick rave about the presenter screen for OO 3, I decided to grab the debs and give it a go.

It still is very slow opening large presentations (i.e. mine), but it does look nicer at least… well… at least some of the widgets do.

Will report back when I’ve had a bit more time to fiddle with it.