Here is the quick notes from the session “Architecture of Maria” from Monty Widenius, one of my all time favorite developer and founder of MySQL.

• Goals
  • To create ACID complaint and Multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)  transactional storage engine for MySQL
  • To replace existing replacement for MyISAM and if possible the default transactional database
  • Maria can run in both transactional and non-transactional, so its easy to replace existing transactional and non-transactional engines
  • To create a storage engine which is good for data warehousing (DW) purposes
• Why Falcon and Maria
  • two different architectures
  • different in feature, compatibility, performance
  • Target is for data warehousing …

Here is the quick notes from the session Falcon from the beginning by Jim Starkey and Ann Harrison

• Why Falcon
  • Hardware is evolving rapidly, world is changing, so taking advantage
  • Customers need ACID transactions
• Where hardware is going
  • CPUS breed like rabbits (more sockets, cores, threads/core)
  • Memory is bigger, faster and cheaper
  • Disks are bigger and cheaper but not much faster
  • In general boxes are getting cheaper
• Where applications are going
  • batch - dead
  • timesharing - dead
  • departmental computing - dead
  • client server - fading fast
  • application servers for most …

Here is the quick notes from the session Scaling MySQL - Up or Out ? moderated by Kaj Arno as part of the todays keynote.

Here is the list of panelists are ordered by Alexa ranking.

1. Monty Taylor (MySQL)
2. Matt Ingerenthron (Sun)
3. John Allspaw (Flickr)
4. Farhan Mashraqi (Fotolog)
5. Domas Mituzas (Wkipedia)
6. Jeff Rotheschild (Facebook)
7. Paul Tuckfield (YouTube)

…

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 …

Here is the notes from “InnoDB status, architecture and new features” by Heikki Tuuri and Ken Jocobs.

• Introduction
  • Announced Plugin 1.0 for MySQL 5.1
  • fast, reliable, proven
  • fast
    • row-level locking, MVCC -> high concurrency & throughput
    • high performance CPU, memory and I/O architecture
    • efficient indexing (covering)
  • reliable
    • automatic crash recovery
    • integrated referencial integrity and transactions
    • online backup
    • well written, well tested and large user community
  …

Here is the notes from MySQL online backup in 6.0 session by Dr. Charles A. Bell, the Author of MySQL Expert book.

• Introduction
  • SQL Driven, run from any client
  • backup to localhost
  • new security privileges for backup/restore
  • blocking restore
  • non-blocking backup for Innodb, Falcon etc
• Overview
  • protection and restore
  • basic functionality of backup and restore available now
  • db level -> table, views, sps, functions, … are supported
  • 6.0.5 has it already, try it
  • source code is another way to look into it
• Design
  • ent level consistency between engines
  • default driver …

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) …

Here is the quick notes from MySQL Cluster by Stewart Smith session that I attended today in the MySQL conference 2008.

• What it is
  • Clustering of in memory databases in a shared-nothing system
  • Designed for HA, 99.9% Uptime (not really) and sub-second failover
  • Supports Hot (online) consistent backup along with compression
  • No locks are used during the backup as NDB uses a global counters
• Think as virtual file system
• Redundancy
  • NoOfReplicas (1,2,3,4), For production use 1 or 2 but don’t use any other as it may have bugs (2 is preferred and well tested mode)
  • 1 means no redundancy (a node fails and cluster fails)
  • 2 means two copies …

This year’s conference has a great lineup. As usual, with 8 sessions concurrently, it’s impossible to pick which ones I want to see. However, I did learn a few things from last year’s conference, which I think will help me get more out of it this time.

Number one rule: not all sessions are created equal. I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty sure that when you see “How Product X Will Scale Your Databases” presented by a person from Company X, you can reasonably suspect that Company X is paying for this privilege, and it’s not really a session as much as a product demo. These sessions were not reviewed and voted on by the community (I know, because I was one of the community members who were asked to review and vote on proposals. Maybe I’m being a whistle-blower and won’t get this honor next year as a result…)

Number two rule: if the description is vague, or if it sounds like regurgitation, I’m skeptical. For …