At the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, Britt Crawford and Justin McCarthy, both from Cafepress.com, gave us a very interesting talk on scaling with HiveDB. I took a few notes (pasted below), their slides are online (warning: 6.1MB PDF), and if you’re after their abstract its available as well.

I also took a video of them (refer to Slide 12, for the IRC conversation):

The quick notes:

• OLTP optimised (as it serves cafepress.com)
• Cannot lock tables, or take it offline
• Constant response time is more important than low latency (little slower query is ok, just not exponentially …

By drinking “Brainiac” at Google of course.

All my photos from the Conference Here

I did an interview with Barton George from Sun while I was at the conference last week. Barton has now posted the interview. If you’re quick, you can listen to it before I do.

Topics: everything and anything, including Maatkit and PostgreSQL.

Baron Schwartz, Barton George, maatkit, mysqluc08, mysqluc2008, Podcast, …

The conference that many of us just went to is called the MySQL Conference and Expo, but a lot of people don’t call it that. They call it by the name it had in 2006 and earlier: MySQL User’s Conference. In fact, some people say (or blog) that they dislike the new name and they’re going to call it the old name, because [… insert reason here…].

I call it by the new name that some people dislike so much. Why? Because it is a conference and expo, not a user’s conference. There’s no reason to pretend otherwise. The conference is organized and owned by MySQL, not the users. It isn’t a community event. It isn’t about you and me first and foremost. It’s about a company trying to successfully build a business, and other companies paying to be sponsors and show their products in the expo hall. Times have changed.

I’m not saying any of this is bad. Being successful in …

Read this doc on Scribd: Record every Referral for Flickr Realtime

Since I wasn’t able to get to this year’s MySQL UC (employer change caused problems with US visa obtaining and I didn’t get visa in time) I’m really interested in all presentations people are posting after their sessions. I decided to collect them all in one place and would like to share with others - maybe someone will find it interesting to read what people have to say about many interesting aspects of MySQL usage.

So, I’ve created a folder in my Scribd.com account which you could use (and track using RSS readers) to find out what interesting presentations were published. You can use either my account or mysqluc08 folder there. One more possible option to track mysqluc presentations/documents is using our …

Hopefully you can’t get enough of the UC08 videos (and thanks to Sheeri for the link with the full Jonathan keynote video), so Zack has managed to get some most posted.

This morning, we learned what it meant to be a pirate in terms of patents, copyright and now politics with the Pirate Party. Don’t let the scary name put you off - these guys are about making all of us consumers (of software, video, audio, books, etc.) more in control of information. Please support these guys by visiting Piratpartiet.se.

Next we had the Scalability Panel with representatives from Facebook, Fotolog, Sun, YouTube, …

I’m pleased to say that I was able to see these in the flesh, but if you aren’t lucky enough to be here (or just want to watch them again), Zack has posted up videos on YouTube of the opening keynote presentations:

• MySQL Conference Keynote 2008 - Marten Mickos
• MySQL Conference Keynote 2008 - Jonathan Schwartz
• MySQL Conference Keynote 2008 - Werner Vogels

Sadly these are only snippets, but if you like what you see, make sure to book your place for next year’s conference early!

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 …

Marten has opened the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo this morning in Santa Clara.

What was funny in the early slides was the photo showing the burning of the IPO Prospectus. Marten mentioned now with many Sun lawyers in the audience he has to be more careful what to say.

This morning while coming down for breakfast, a Sun employee entered the lift. I introduced myself, and he indicated he knew me by name. When I asked what department he was in, he said “legal”. Being intrigued as to who he knew me, I’d discovered he has read my emails and blog posts.

I must admit I’ve met a number of new people this week and the first word has been “Oh!”, as in they have heard of my name previously.

These have been unexpected responses and information for me, I’m not normally surprised like this. I’ll not be changing what I say, and how I say it, professionally my writing and publishing will continue to embody …