Last week was a banner week for MySQL at OSCON. We had many MySQL developers meeting with the MySQL community, conducting technical sessions, leading BOF sessions, working the exhibit hall, and confirming Oracle's leadership in the technical evolution of MySQL.  The highlight of the week was the unveiling of even more 5.6 early access InnoDB and Replication features that are now available for early adopters to download, evaluate and shape via labs.mysql.com.  

InnoDB is one of MySQL's "crown jewels" and beginning in 5.5 is now the default storage engine.  The following 5.6 feature improvements are in direct response to community and customer feedback and requests.  The new 5.6 early access features include:

• Full-text search
  
• REDO log files max size extended to 2 TB
• UNDO logs on their own tablespace …

The MariaDB Project is at OSCON 2011. We’ve got a booth, and we plan to also have a BoF session: Wednesday 27 July 2011 at room E142 at 8pm.

There will as usual be lots of black vodka (there was some yesterday at the MySQL BoF as well), and we’re going to talk about and celebrate the release of MariaDB 5.3.0 beta.

Come drop by the booth… we clearly have an interesting booth giveaway. And feel free to say hi to Kurt von Finck, Michael “Monty” Widenius, or Colin Charles who will be present, walking around, etc. Spot them in a MariaDB t-shirt of course!

Back in February I wrote an article titled A Small Fix For mysql-agent. Since then we did a few more fixes to the agent and included a Bytes Behind Master (or BBM) chart. For those who can't wait to get their hands on the code, here's the current version: MySQL SNMP agent RPM. For those who'd like to learn about it's capabilities and issues, keep reading.

What to Expect From this Version
The article I quoted above pretty much describes the main differences with the original project, but we went further with the changes while still relying on Masterzen's code for the data collection piece.

The first big change is that we transformed Masterzen's code into a Perl module, …

This year I'll attend OSCON for the first time. I'll give two talks:

• PHP and MySQL - Recent Developments
  PHP’s MySQL support recently received many changes under the hood. PHP 5.3 introduced mysqlnd – the MySQL native driver which is a replacement for libmysql deeply bound into PHP. In this presentation you will learn what the PHP and MySQL development teams were up to. After starting with an introduction of the PHP-stack, demystifying things like mysqli, mysqlnd or PDO, this presentation will show you how to build mysqlnd plugins as PHP C extension and hooking into mysqlnd from PHP userland. It will also discuss existing plugins like a client side query cache or a module for doing read-write-splitting, both working transparently, without changes to your application.
• …

OSCON is coming up again: July 25th-29th in wonderful Portland, OR. If you come to OSCON, not only will you be at OSCON, but you’ll be in Portland in July – which is just lovely. We’ll also have other people from Percona there and it should be a great lot of fun.

So come along and talk interesting technology – I’ll be speaking on “Dropping ACID: Eating Data in a Web 2.0 Cloud World“. If you know my love of reliable software with known failure modes, you’ll probably enjoy this one – especially if you saw my “Eat My Data: How everybody gets POSIX file I/O Wrong” which when given at OSCON 2008 was given to a packed room with people in the aisles and out the door.

Speaking has its pluses and minuses of course. It takes a very, very …

Trying a new format… Are you subscribed to the announce mailing list? The following is straight from the archives.

Highlights:

• Release of MariaDB 5.1.55
• Meeting in Lisbon
• Call for volunteers for booth duty

Events:

• DrupalCon Chicago
• Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco

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MariaDB 5.1.55 Released

Dear MariaDB users,

The development team have been busy and are ready to release MariaDB 5.1.55. MariaDB is a branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, myriad bug fixes and …

Josh Berkus gave a great talk at linux.conf.au 2010 (the CFP for linux.conf.au 2011 is open until August 7th) entitled “How to destroy your community” (lwn coverage). It was a simple, patented, 10 step program, finely homed over time to have maximum effect. Each step is simple and we can all name a dozen companies that have done at least three of them.

Simon Phipps this past week at OSCON talked about Open Source Continuity in practice – specifically mentioning some open source software projects that were at Sun but have since been abandoned by Oracle and different strategies you can put in place to …

The history and accomplishments attributed to VistA, the Veterans
Administration's core administrative software, mark it as one of the
most impressive software projects in history. Still, lots of smart
people in the health care field deprecate VistA and cast doubt that it
could ever be widely adopted. Having spent some time with people on
both sides, I'll look at their arguments in this blog, and then
summarize other talks I heard today at the href="http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010">Open Source Convention
health care track.

Yesterday, as href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/07/day-one-of-the-health-care-it.html">I
described in my previous blog, we heard an overview of trends in
health care and its open source side in particular. Two open source
free software projects offering electronic health records were
presented, …

I’m at OSCON this week. Come say hi and talk Drizzle, Rackspace, cloud, photography, vegan food or brewing.

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We’re at OSCON and today has been fabulous – I’ve just been connecting with old friends, and making new friends, and all this is what makes the travel experience completely worthwhile. If you’re at OSCON, why not come to a couple of BoF’s:

1. MariaDB: The Community Fork of MySQL at 8pm on Monday 19/07/2010. Great for a general overview of MariaDB, for beginners to the advanced folk to come to.
2. MariaDB: Features In-depth at 9pm on Wednesday 21/07/2010. Great if you’re a more intermediate to advanced user of MySQL/MariaDB and want to know more about the additional features MariaDB has to offer, and what else it might offer in the near future (i.e. what are you …