(My apologies for not finalizing either the meeting or making the RMS talk last week; I was out at the MySQL User's Conference <http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/content/home> … though not exactly as a user — I actually started working at MySQL just about a month ago. :)
The 2008 MySQL User's Conference was quite amazing, with some 2000 people in attendance. With 8 options for each of the 6 slots for each of the 3 key conference days ... there was a lot of interesting content. While the Monday of the conference did have a full 8 hours of tutorials, I was elsewhere in meetings. Tuesday started off with a rather nice keynote from Mårten Mickos, the now Senior VP of the Database Group at Sun Microsystems, about the State of MySQL, followed by another great keynote from Jonathan Schwartz about Sun and Sun's vision for Open Source and MySQL, including the great annecdote at <http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/freedom_s_choice>. I was really looking forward to the keynote following that from Werner Vogels of Amazon, but it was unbalanced and fluffy. As I said above, there were ~48 sessions a day, so I can only talk briefly about some of the highlights: - Multi-terabyte MySQL Data Warehouses? Absolutely! - This was mostly a marketing presentation from InfoBright, but their new storage engine does sound novel and fantastic for handling very large datasets with warehousing-type workloads. - Best Practices for Database Administrators - The presenter is a consultant who is charismatic and energetic. The content is mostly well-known stuff about database admin and, really, technical job stuff in general, but the presentation was good and covered a lot of ground. - I understand that the Wednesday morning keynote from Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party was quite good. - Replication Tips and Tricks - Some nifty fine-grained tips to deal with various replication scenarios. If you do replication (in mysql or otherwise), you should see the slides online. - Database Integrity Protection with MySQL and DRBD - drbd is the distributed replicated block device. It is a block device (e.g. hard disk) that is synchronously replicated to another block device, perhaps over a network. Operating at such a low level, it can support HA/failover for a wide variety of applications, including MySQL, Samba, email, &c. Definitely worth checking out. - Developing INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugins - "SELECT * FROM os_disk_stats WHERE utilization > 90" Sure! Whatever you can think up or access in code can be pretty easily mapped into an INFORMATION_SCHEMA table via plugins. - Architecture of Maria: A New Storage Engine with a Transactional Design - Maria is intended to be a backwards-compatible replacement for MyISAM, with the features of InnoDB (transactions!) but with the goodies that we love MyISAM for (speed!). Early versions are available, though it's a multi-year roadmap. - One of Thursday morning's keynotes entitled "Who is the Dick on My Site?" was roundly agreed to be one of the funniest ever. - DTrace and MySQL - There wasn't a whole lot of MySQL in this, but DTrace is awesome. The conference was grand, and next year should be even bigger and better. Most of the conference presentations are online, and if you need to get in touch with any of the participants, I may be able to help. Of course, if you're looking for MySQL support, I can happily get you in touch with one of my colleagues in Support or Sales. :) -- ...jsled http://asynchronous.org/ - a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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