Speaking at the 2008 MySQL Conference

Yes - it's that time again ;-)


The new year has just started which means the MySQL Conference and Expo is little more than 3 months away. I am very glad to have the opportunity to attend, and even more glad to be speaking.

I will be doing two sessions:

• Writing MySQL UDFs - A 3 hour tutorial for people that want to get started writing MySQL UDFs. PHP and/or Java skills recommended - No pre-existing C skills required.
• Grand tour of the Information Schema and its applications - a session that demonstrate how to make practical use of the information_schema

I'll provide some more details about my sessions shortly, but enough of that for now. Instead, I'd like to share a list of some of the sessions (in no particular order) I am looking forward to attend:

• Astronomy, Petabytes and MySQL, Kian-Tat Lim; Stanford Linear Accelerator Center:

  The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will produce more than 100 petabytes of data when it goes on-line in 2014. All the non-pixel data will be managed by a database. This database is expected to contain some 50 billion astronomical objects, 3 trillion detections of those objects, and all the project’s metadata; a single copy will amount to tens of petabytes.



• Architecture of Maria, the New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL - Michael "Monty" Widenius; MySQL AB: Overall design of this new transactional (MVCC) storage engine.


• DBSlayer: A Simpler Way To Proxy, Derek Gottfrid; The New York Times:

  The DBAccessLayer or DBSlayer (http://code.nytimes.com/projects/dbslayer) for short is a lightweight, open source, web aware proxying and pooling layer for MySQL used for backend architecture at nytimes.com. Assembled out of a few open-source libraries, DBSlayer communicates with clients using HTTP as a protocol and JSON as an encoding, instead of the custom binary protocols common to other proxying mechanisms. This enables the DBSlayer to easily interoperate with any programming languages that speak HTTP and JSON.



• External Language Stored Procedures for MySQL, Antony Curtis and Eric Herman; MySQL AB:

  With version 5.0, MySQL delivered a stored procedure implementation and here we extend it to provide general support for external language stored procedures. We detail the philosophy and design of the external language stored procedure framework and its implementation within the server and libraries. We then also detail how an external language plug-in is written using the simple skeleton plug-in which exercises the basic interfaces between the server and external stored procedures.



• MySQL Cluster with Replication for Financial Transactions - Cicero Torteli; Paggo
• Optimizing MySQL and InnoDB on Solaris 10 for World's Largest Photo Blogging Community - Farhan Mashraqi; Fotolog:

  Fotolog is a top 19 Internet destination with more than 12 million members, 315 million photos and more than 3 billion page views a month. Through modifications to its data architecture, Fotolog was able to serve four times the number of users using the same number of database servers. A non-conventional, hybrid presentation that conveys the importance of scalability, performance tuning and schema optimizations in a practical way.

• Geographical Information and OpenGIS on MySQL - Markus Franz, BF Blogform Search GmbH:

  In this presentation, Markus Franz shows how to efficiently handle geographical information in a MySQL based environment. The presentation covers setup of a structured database, calculation of distances between two or more points, social tagging for data and solutions to automatically guess geo tags from existing content. This session is highly recommended for those who look for powerfull ways to enhance existing business infrastructures with geographical information.

• MySQL Proxy Wizardry - Giuseppe Maxia; MySQL AB:

  Are you tired of the limiting stored routines language? Can you distribute queries to several servers transparently? Try the power of MySQL Proxy. You will see an apparently normal MySQL server do all the above, and much more, with the addition of MySQL Proxy, a lightweight application that extends the server features on the fly.



• The Lost Art of the Self Join Beat Vontobel, Meteonews AG:

  Can you solve a Sudoku with only one SELECT statement? No temporary tables, SQL extensions, stored procedures or functions, not even non-relational features such as ORDER or GROUP BY—just plain joins and predicates? You can! With a combination of (admittedly quite a few) self joins.



• Developing INFORMATION_SCHEMA Plugins, Mark Leith; MySQL AB:

  A walk through of a very basic ‘HELLO WORLD’ INFORMATION_SCHEMA table, showing a user the very bare minimum that is required to create a pluggable I_S table. Then, examples of making some more interesting plugins – such as including the SIGAR OS statistics gathering library to collect CPU, Memory, Disk, Network and OS Configuration data within I_S tables, and a general ‘df -h’ INFORMATION_SCHEMA table.

• EXPLAIN demystified, Baron Schwartz; The Rimm-Kaufman Group, LLC:

  I learned EXPLAIN by studying source code, documentation, and learning from the query optimizer team. I verified everything I learned with complex test cases. Along the way I discovered how to reverse-engineer EXPLAIN into a query execution plan. Finally, I wrote a program to do this—MySQL Visual Explain, the first of its kind. In this session I’ll teach EXPLAIN from the ground up.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg!

There is just so much good stuff, it's hard to single out a few. Anyway - take a look at the schedule yourself. Word is that you can get Early Bird discounts up to somewhere in Februari, and there is also a 15% Alumni discount for attendees of past conferences. Check out the details here.

CU @ UC!!!