You can now apt-get your way to MariaDB 5.1, courtesy of OurDelta and in close cooperation with Monty Program Ab. To get started, simple follow the info on the Debian and Ubuntu pages.

Quick overview

• For MariaDB we use different repository directories to ensure that you can’t accidentally upgrade or revert major versions without you explicitly choosing to do so.
• At this point we have Ubuntu Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty and Karmic for you, as well as Debian 4 (Lenny). Etch (Debian 4) is waiting on a small fix (thanks to Antony Curtis for helping with that).
• The package names start with mariadb*, except …

I'm not personally there this year, but Walter Heck will be. In case you haven't met Walter yet, photo enclosed ;-)

He's a techie, like you, and he'd love to meet you and hear how you're using MySQL and surrounding technologies and what things might make your life easier in terms of application architecture, development, deployment, maintenance, and so on.

This may or may not fit with the services that Open Query provides, but the key point is to listen, not sell. If there's a good match, of course that's fine too!

As a sidenote, just to pre-empt the inevitable question of "Arjen why are you not here?": flying over to the US has always been fine, but coming back is a pile of grief every time taking multiple weeks to recover. I've never had that issue with for …

...is that truth is stranger than fiction. Reality does not appear any more plausible than plain nonsense.

We were discussing this yesterday on #ourdelta (Freenode IRC) in the context of How MySQL really executes a query by Baron. Antony Curtis noted that if he'd write a truthful post on that topic, people would think it was made-up regardless of the day of the year!

Another proof of the premise: Baron has now put a giant banner above/below his post, explaining that it was a joke. Apparently that's necessary?

I tend to come up with neat ideas for April Fools throughout the year, neglect to write them down, and come the day I have a blank. But, given the above, there's another option: you just write a truthful story, still leaving people …

…is that truth is stranger than fiction. Reality does not appear any more plausible than plain nonsense.

We were discussing this yesterday on #ourdelta (Freenode IRC) in the context of How MySQL really executes a query by Baron. Antony Curtis noted that if he’d write a truthful post on that topic, people would think it was made-up regardless of the day of the year!

Another proof of the premise: Baron has now put a giant banner above/below his post, explaining that it was a joke. Apparently that’s necessary?

I tend to come up with neat ideas for April Fools throughout the year, neglect to write them down, and come the day I have a blank. But, given the above, there’s another option: you just write a truthful story, still leaving people wondering …

Sounds a bit far fetched (pun intended ;-), but we're doing it. This is not inside of the MySQL server, but rather the overall application design. Let me run you through the logic...

Some key aspects to scaling are: not doing unnecessary queries, and caching what you can. Just a quick baseline. The fastest query is the one you don't do, or the one you've already done before - the latter being caching.

A simple yet brilliant example of this is the Youtube trick where a script reads the relay log, converting updates into appropriate selects and running them so that the InnoDB cache will have the blocks in memory when the slave SQL thread executes the actual update. Maatkit now has a tool for this, so it's publically available. It's not quite predictive, but it's a neat trick anyway that sometimes comes in handy. Search engines use similar tricks.

Extending on this, with certain applications you actually …

Sounds a bit far fetched (pun intended ;-), but we’re doing it. This is not inside of the MySQL server, but rather the overall application design. Let me run you through the logic…

Some key aspects to scaling are: not doing unnecessary queries, and caching what you can. Just a quick baseline. The fastest query is the one you don’t do, or the one you’ve already done before - the latter being caching.

A simple yet brilliant example of this is the Youtube trick where a script reads the relay log, converting updates into appropriate selects and running them so that the InnoDB cache will have the blocks in memory when the slave SQL thread executes the actual update. Maatkit now has a tool for this, so it’s publically available. It’s not quite predictive, but it’s a neat trick anyway that sometimes comes in handy. Search engines use similar tricks.

Extending on this, with certain applications you actually tell …

While I'm in Melbourne in a few weeks for training I'm once again visiting my friends at Linux Users of Victoria (LUV). It's been a while since my schedule coincided with their meeting schedule!

I've been invited to do one of the talks (Sandrine Balbo doing the other), and my topic is "Relax! A Failure is NOT an Emergency." which is although somewhat MySQL-related not actually MySQL-specific.

This will be on Tuesday April 7th. You can find more detailed description and location/time info in the LUV announcement.

If you'd like to follow shorter scribbles of what I get up to, like my work at Open Query, OurDelta and of course the BlueHackers initiative, I've got myself organised at http://twitter.com/arjenlentz or http://identi.ca/arjenlentz (you can pick one, they have the same feed).