Here is a semi-liveblog from the opening keynote of the 2009 MySQL Conference & Expo on April 21st in Santa Clara, California. Karen Padir presents “State of the Dolphin”.
The room is big, with 2 screens on each side of the central stage. It seems to be completely filling up, but I got a good spot on the second row in the front. Directly around me I see Dups, Sheeri, Giuseppe, Kai, Mark Callaghan and many other faces I know, even they don’t necessarily know me 🙂
Opening music, fancy animations. Quotes from satisfied customers, combined with tribal-style music and statistics.
Colin Charles kicks off. Good morning, welcome. learn a lot, provide feedback. Thanking sponsors in the first minute..
Introduces Karen Padir, she promised to bring more women to the conference next year.
Welcome, she introduces herself, tells where she is from and what she did in her education. Jokes: “Odds are good but the goods are odd” about sun’s crowd.
Went to Redhat for a year in between working for Sun, because of opensource interest. She came back to Sun because of Sun’s OSS commitment. Shows a slide with a bunch of different Open Source-ish projects at Sun.
She worked with Glassfish for a long time, encourages people to go by them at the expo hall.
Now, on Oracle. Talks about Oracles commitment to opensource. names two examples of sideline involvement of Oracle in Sun projects. Doesn’t really come across, but might be me.
Everyone uses MySQL everyday, whether on Facebook, Google or whatever.
MySQL had a great year! some stats fly by. 5.1 has gained momentum: 3+M downloads in 100 days. 54% of users have 5.1 in production.
Sheet: What I’ve heard. Waht she has learned in the past 2 months since she has been on the job.
MySQL 5.4 is released today. What happened to 5.2 and 5.3 http://www.mysql.com/5.4
– innodb scalability: up to 16 way x86
– subquery optimizations
– new query algorithms
Some stats fly by for InnoDb that look promising, but i wonder what will hapopen in real life.
Introduces Ken Jacobs. Ken starts talkng about where the improvements of 59% come from: opensource ecosystem.
5.4 will have more features in teh near future. Fast online index creation, compressed table storage. Will be intorduced in the next weeks.
Ken announces new product: embedded InnoDb. low level non-sql api.
karen gives him acquirer of teh year award, with a bottle of vodka. Whoever comes with 9 billion next year will win then 🙂
Karen takes over again, introduces MySQL cluster 7.0. It disappears before I can look at the slide, apparently not that important 🙂
Next: MySQL query analyser. She asks who uses it. very few hands. Pulls mark Matthews and Gary Whizin up on the stage with a joke. They work for MySQL Monitor engineering team.
They tell a story about what happens when you have a slow app. The oldway: dig in and have not so much fun. New way: enterprise monitor. Mark showcases the tool by analyzing an off-the -helf CRM, not very interesting.
Karen comes back, asks all former and current MySQL employees to stand up. She thanks them all, quite genuinely. Nice thought 🙂
Community contributions. Says 5.4 is a good example of community contributions. Sounds strange since noone knew it was coming.
commits to monthly updates on all shipping community releases.
Invites Kaj Arno to the stage. Kaj says he wants to have documentation GPL’ed.
Next: MySQL drizzle project: she calls it shepherded by Sun/MySQL.
Next: MySQL awards.
Partner awards: Intel, infobright, lifeboat.
Applications of the year: Zappos.com, Alcatel-lucent and Symantec.
Community: Marc Delisle, Ronald Bradford and Shlomi Noach
Announces the rest of the conference.
Colin Charles announces Mark Callaghan (turns out he was sitting right in front of me 🙂 ) from google. introduces himself.
Talks about adapting MySQL to their needs, easier than making apps adapt to MySQL. Talks about using MySQL at google, cannot name numbers unfortunately.
many primary shards, with many replica’s per shard. They are happy with MySQL.
Tells that he is amazed at how many slaves can be coupled with a master. They found out by trial-and-error.
Thanks, Monty, MySQL people, Heikki Tuuri and company. inspiration provided by Yasufumi and Percona.
History of MySQL at google: first MyISAM and another RDBMS. after that 4.0 and Inno. After mark arrived they upgraded to 5.0.
Talks abotu features of an enterprise DBMS, the problems they overcame, how they test new MySQL builds: stress test, sample workloads, killing off servers, check for compiler warnings and check for data drift (test same workload with old and new build and see if they are the same).
How to deploy: automatically searching aggregate error logs. Keep track of number of crashes on daily basis. Automated removal of machines from service.
How to monitor: user_stats and table_stats patches. Monitor top-down, they use more bash and awk then mysql enterprise monitor 🙂
Talks abotu features they added (and sometimes removed) from/to replication. Crash safe-slaves, Semi-sync replication, global transaction ID’s
Performance features they added. InnoDb improvements, backport connection pool feature from MySQL 6. Stresses they are not the only ones doing it (Percona, Sun, Innodb)
Manageability features they added and other features they added: row-change logging, Flapulator (bash and awk scripts in cron jobs checking for crashes etc.), Online data drift checking.
Tells about the crises they have had and the open problems they have, the runs out of time.
Next it is on to Kickfire, who are a big sponsor. I end my liveblog here 🙂
I will post pictures asapI’ve posted photos, although the camera was pretty crappy, so it might not be very good quality. Donations for a new camera are welcome 😉
Zak’s uploaded the photos for me to his flickr account – view the set here.
