Next week, a couple of us at Tokutek will be heading to Buenos Aires for the MySQL / MariaDB Conference & Expo LA. Gerry Narvaja actually grew up in Buenos Aires. My own family is Argentinian. I spent several years there as a child, and my childhood home in South Carolina was Argentinian in spirit: absolutely no English, and the only grits that entered my house were served with tomato sauce and called polenta!

As some of you get ready to visit Buenos Aires, maybe for the first time, I thought I’d share an abbreviated list of my favorite things to do.

First of all, make sure to watch the really fantastic con movie Nueve Reinas. Not only is it a great movie, but much of it takes place in the Hilton where the conference will be held.

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Modern file systems are well equipped to deal with large writes. One area that remains challenging however is to efficiently write out “microdata”, such as metadata and small portions of large files, while showing good I/O utilization when the data is read back. This challenge is evident with mount options like “noatime” which disables updating file access time on reads. This kind of solution avoids the problem altogether. Another approach, delayed allocation, is meant to coalesce small writes in memory as long as possible before writing it out to disk. Filesystems like ext4 and Btrfs use delayed allocation to make a best-effort at reducing fragmentation and random I/O.

Isn’t there a way to fundamentally solve filesystem fragmentation and random I/O?

This week, I’ll be speaking at HotStorage 2012 in Boston. My talk …

I’ll be attending this year’s US based Open Database Camp from June 8-10 in Charlotte, NC. The conference is co-located with SouthEast LinuxFest 2012.

It appears that OpenSQL Camp was renamed Open Database Camp since I see many database technologies listed on their site that do not use SQL as an access method. The final schedule of presentations shows lots of MySQL content for Friday. There is one session each for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB on Saturday. Sunday is “unconference” style, hopefully we can get more variety in those sessions.

I love attending this type of conference because I learn how real-world users are implementing MySQL to meet their needs. It also gives me a chance to see some …

Do you want to closely follow what MySQL is doing around the globe? We've created a Lanyrd guide just for that. It's curated by the MySQL Community, Marketing, Presales and Product Management teams and with some other contributions too.
Tomorrow we'll host the MySQL Innovation Day (in streaming too) and MySQL Connect is also quickly approaching. If you'd like showcase your products and services to the MySQL Community you can take advantage of the various sponsorship opportunities.

Stay tuned for the latest and greatest updates from the MySQL team at Oracle and from our vibrant community!
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A big thanks goes out to everyone involved with the MySQL Connect Content Committee. We had a great response to the call for papers and realize that it took a considerable amount of time and effort to review the submitted sessions and BOFs. While Oracle employees aided with this effort, the MySQL Community deserves to be acknowledged for the time they took out of their busy schedules to help with our conference. Their input was invaluable to the support of the MySQL Community. Continued support such as this from the community is another reason that MySQL continues to be #1 open source database. We'll keep you posted as we finalize and publish the sessions, BoFs and HOLs for MySQL Connect.

Thanks to the following committee members:

MySQL Community:

• Ronald …

Why demos?

For as long as I can remember in my public speaking activities, I have always planned my presentations with some sort of live demo in it. I am always surprised when a conference venue asks me to provide my slides in advance, to be loaded in an anonymous computer with no chance of demos. I always turn down such offers, as I always want to provide a demo.

There have been times when technical or time constraints prevented me from demoing something, and in these cases I felt that the presentation was lacking a vital part. But I always try. I have even given demos during lightning talks, and those were the ones that made me feel really good.

I have given hundreds of presentations, and hundreds of demos, and as in every human activity, I have made plenty of mistakes. I believe I have learned some valuable lesson from my mistakes, and this article is my attempt at sharing the joy with wannabe presenters and also with …

Challenges of Big Databases with MySQL

Many database management tasks become difficult as you move from millions of rows and gigabytes of data to billions of rows and terabytes of data. Such tasks include ingesting data while maintaining indexes; changing schemas without downtime; and supporting connections, replication, and backup. For some scaling problems (connections and replication), MySQL is better than most of the competition. For others, such as indexing, schema changes, and backup, MySQL has typically been harder to use. Fortunately, the tasks MySQL does well are in its core, whereas the tasks that are more difficult can be solved with storage engine plug-ins.

This presentation discusses how MySQL’s storage engines have recently made dramatic progress in large …

The journey to the Hotel in Santa Clara took me something like 16 hours. It was long, arduous and at times despairing, but was it worth it? Absolutely! I made the epic journey with my Pythian (and former Nokia) colleague Andrew Moore, and once at the conference we met up with more members of our [...]

MySQLBoy attends the annual MySQL Conference and Expo host by Percona. [part 1 of 2]

Day 1 is the first official day of the Percona Live MySQL Conference. It began with two mini keynotes by Peter Zaitev and Baron Schwarz of Percona talking about the history of MySQL and his beginnings in the open source movement, respectively. It was very nostalgic, and I’m sure it brought a tear to a few people’s eyes.

Following the dynamic duo was full keynotes by Mårten Mickos (Eucalyptus Systems) on “Making LAMP a Cloud” and Brian Aker (HP) on “The New MySQL Cloud Ecosystem”. To be honest, I found the full keynotes to be quite disappointing. For me, the keynotes speeches should be about a topic that is visionary or notable in some way. What I got from the keynotes were:  MySQL is good, MySQL is growing, let me show you my product around MySQL, and buy/use my product. They felt far more like glorified sales pitches.

I remember that at the last conference I attended, SXSW Interactive, the keynotes by Ray …