MySQL updates
The MySQL Users Conference is almost over in sunny California and the output for those of us we didn't make the trip has been overwhelming with over 100 blog posts in a few days.
MySQL is booming. There are three new engines: Solid, an old friend that I used for testing on my Telenet days and had to drop due to management distrust (lessons we learn when we are young: don't listen to management when choosing technical solutions); PBXT, a brand new engine, fully ACID-compliant with some novel ideas about database layout on disks (white paper worth a read); and Falcon, an MySQL.com engine, developed in house by Jim Starkey, a ACID/MVCC guru (two articles about his presentation). And as a final item in the storage engine department, Oracle renewed the InnoDB aggrement with MySQL. All in all great news.
I've also been collecting all the talks that are online, and reading all that I can find. So far the one I liked the most is from Ask Bjørn Hansen (online at his site). But there are others:
- Technorati: impressive, due to sheer numbers. These are stuck in my head: 100Tb of data, 200+ MySQL instances, 1Tb added per day;
- Mike Hillyer's presentation about Mixi was also cool;
- Also, by Mike Hillyer's (see comments, thanks!) Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL. Because I like hierarchical data.
Some Flickr information, partly MySQL-related, was also covered in a recent O'Reilly Radar by Tim. This last one is specially useful for people dealing with tags (Hint, Hint, you know who you are :) ).
Unrelated to MySQL UC, J. Scott Johnson also made a presentation on php|tek about MySQL at Ookles.com.
There are common themes:
- data partitioning;
- small (mostly two servers) master-master clusters, many of them;
- InnoDB, some MyISAM;
- memcached, perlbal (Brad should be proud);
Other presentations I would love to see online, or some notes:
- MySQL Partitioning, by Philip Antoiniades;
- What Not to Include in Your DB Schema, and Why, by Danny O'Brien, EFF;
- MySQL GUI Tools for the Enterprise, by Michael G. Zinner. I would love to hear more about two-way sync of schemas that MySQL Workbench is supposed to bring us;
- Perl DBD::mysql Latest Enhancements and Features, by Patrick Galbraith. Did they fix the utf8 problems? Not clear from the abstract;
- My Second Life Runs on MySQL: War Stories from the Metaverse, by Ian Wilkes. If not for anything else than to listen about Second Life, probably the nearest thing out there like Metaverse;
- and finally PHP at Yahoo!, by Michael Radwin: mostly because I still find hard to believe that PHP and "maintainable over long periods of time" should be used the same phrase. Before we trash me, I use PHP daily, ok?
Great times for MySQL. Great times indeed.
Update: got a couple more presentations related to MySQL. I'm just linking them here for future reference:
- by Mike Hillyer, two presentations: Normalization session from PHP Quebec 2005 and The Sakila Sample Database.