I'd like to bring two announcements to your attention, that I posted to our internals Mailing list a few days ago - both refer to ongoing activities at MySQL AB to further open up our development processes and to establish an Architecture of Participation around the MySQL Server and related applications.

I am excited to be able to talk about this topic at the upcoming FrOSCon, which will take place on August, 25th-26th in Sankt Augustin, Germany. The title of my presentation will be "Opening the doors of the Cathedral - Enabling an architecture of participation around the MySQL Server". Here's the abstract:

Even though the MySQL Server is released and distributed as Open Source Software (OSS) under the GPL, the development itself so far has mostly …

Thanks to MySQL community members we’ve got really great collection of media files from the recent mysqluc. Thanks to Seeri for all that work he’s done to collect everything in one place so we could watch/listen/read information from this great event.

So, if you did not attended mysqluc07, then you definitely should visit Technocation page, dedicated to this conference.

P.S. I’m going to post links to these videos and descriptions for the sessions on the Best Tech Videos soon, so If you are not sure to watch some video or not, just wait while I’m merging these links with information from mysqluc site.

OSDC is a grass-roots conference providing Open Source developers with an opportunity to meet, share, learn, and of course show-off. OSDC focuses on Open Source developers building solutions directly for customers and other end users, anything goes as long as the code or the development platform is Open Source. Last year's conference attracted over 180 people, 60 talks, and 6 tutorials. Entry for delegates is kept easy by maintaining a low registration fee (approx $300), which always includes the conference dinner.

This year OSDC will be held in Brisbane from the 26th to the 29th of November, with an extra dedicated stream for presentations on Open Source business development, case studies, software process, and project management. The theme for this year's conference is "Success in Development & Business". If you are an Open Source maintainer, developer or user we would encourage you to submit a talk proposal on the open-source …

The 2007 MySQL Conference is over, and I finally made it back home. I have some notes on some of the sessions, which really aren't that great, so if you want to see what you missed, you should read Planet MySQL. But I will give some of the highlights.

There's a lot of new development around storage engines.

MySQL-5.1 has a pluggable storage engine architecture which allows you to load and unload storage engines while the server is running. Brian Aker explained that this is for cases where you have a stable server setup and only want to upgrade the storage engine. All the storage engines in 5.1 are pluggable, and there are already some third-party proprietary storage engines available.

One of the relatively new third-party storage engines is SolidDB. Solid has been around for quite awhile. In fact, I was using Solid for a project in the late 1990's …

So, first two days of mysqlconf’07 are finished now. What can I say is that without any doubts: It worth it! If you’re working on some high traffic projects, some high-loaded database driven systems, etc, you definitely should attend such conferences - you’d never be able to get such big amounts of information from the best people in the industry as you can get here.

I’ve been attending mostly practical MySQL scale-out sessions and BOFs and I’ve got really controversial impressions. No - everybody was great, controversial thing is my own level - I never before was so sure that I know nothing at all! I see people here for which most of new things for me (especially in MySQL scaling) are pretty obvious and it is hard to keep myself from some kind of self-beating because I don’t know these things.

Interesting thing happened today - I clearly realized why YouTube guys got their billion and we or someone else didn’t - IMHO - …

Even though MySQL is used to power a lot of web sites and applications that handle large binary objects (BLOBs) like images, videos or audio files, these objects are usually not stored in MySQL tables directly today. The reason for that is that the MySQL Client/Server protocol applies certain restrictions on the size of objects that can be returned and that the overall performance is not acceptable, as the current MySQL storage engines have not really been optimized to properly handle large numbers of BLOBs. To work around these limitations, these projects usually just store a reference to the object (e.g. a path name in a regular file system). This approach works around the limitations applied by the MySQL Server, but results in a disconnection and potential source of inconsistency between the database and the file system content. There was an interesting discussion about that topic on Sheeri's …

In two weeks from now, the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007 will take place in Santa Clara, California. Our team has been very busy with working with the conference management team from O'Reilly to prepare for this event, especially Jay who is in charge of organizing and arranging the more than 110 sessions that will be held in several parallel tracks. The conference program looks very exciting, I am impressed by the wide range of topics and quality of speakers that we have lined up.

In addition to the presentations and tutorials, there will also be an Expo, where partner companies will exhibit their …

Here's my tentative agenda for sessions I am interested in at the MySQL Conference:
Monday

• MySQL 5.1 In-depth
• Real-World MySQL Performance Tuning

Tuesday

• Using Stored Routines for MySQL Administration
• MySQL 5.1's Log Tables
• …

Just for reference, here are some previous posts I did for the 2005 MySQL User Conference:

• Day 0
• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4

Not that these are particularly awesome or anything, but there are a few travels notes which may possibly be useful if you decide to go this year, since it's in the same location.

If you have the time, and you are from outside The Valley, catch …

Thanks to a gift from MySQL AB, I'll be attending the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007. I presented at the 2005 conference, and found the conference itself to be pretty educational. Plus the food is generally pretty good at the O'Reilly conferences. Of course the real reason people to conferences is for the swag. Now this year's PyCon had some pretty good swag; I got at least six free T-shirts and two Rubik's cubes. So top that.