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I am thrilled to announce that this year’s MySQL Conference will feature a Community Keynote. This is a keynote speech delivered by a community member (not a Sun employee!) about topics relevant to us.

I am delivering this year’s keynote, entitled “How to be a MySQL Superhero” on Wednesday, April 22nd at 9:45 am Pacific. Details are at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/9098. This is a great indication that Sun and O’Reilly are taking community very seriously, and want to make sure that our voices are heard — literally.

I hope that this can be an annual featured keynote, like the “State of the Dolphin.” The thriving community is one of the reasons MySQL is the world’s most popular database.

Giuseppe Maxia and I are in the exact middle of our leg of theMySQL Campus Tour. Yesterday’s session was recorded — play the video online right in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/700/play or download the 80 Mb .mov file at http://technocation.org/node/700/download.

A PDF of the slides can be downloaded at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Tour.pdf (21 Mb).

Click on the thumbnails for larger pictures of the standing-room only crowd, and lunch with the great folks at Cal Poly afterwards:

Links referred to in the presentation, or related to the presentation:

The MySQL forge can be found at http://forge.mysql.com, which contains the Wiki (http://forge.mysql.com/wiki) as well as the worklog, code snippets and tools for use with MySQL.

To keep up to date with us, read Giuseppe’s blog, my blog and where I work. Planet MySQL is an aggregate of MySQL-related blogs, including Giuseppe’s and mine.

The website for the 2009 MySQL User Conference and Expo is at http://mysqlconf.com. MySQL Camp is a free conference at the same time as the User Conference. The details, including the schedule, are at
http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLCamp2009Sessions.

A collection of User Group videos is at http://technocation.org/category/areas/user-group. All the videos, including User Group ones, are at
http://technocation.org/category/areas/presentationsvideos.

The videos from the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo are at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008Notes

The videos from the 2007 MySQL User Conference and Expo are at http://www.technocation.org/content/2007-mysql-user-conference-and-expo-presentations-and-videos

Episodes of the MySQL podcast can be found at http://technocation.org/category/areas/podcasts

Learn more about MySQL University, a free, drop-in, weekly in-depth session of technical issues (such as MySQL internals) at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_University.

MySQL Proxy information, including a getting started guide, can be found at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Proxy.

The Sunday before the MySQL User Conference is always full of trying to meet up with new or old friends, even if your flight lands after dinnertime. With that in mind, the very first event of the week is MySQL Camp’s “Games Day”.

From 12 noon until midnight on the Mezzanine of the Santa Clara Hyatt Hotel (adjoining the Santa Clara Convention Center), there will be an informal games day. The list of games that are definitely appearing are on the MySQL Forge at:

http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2009SundayNotes

There is still one game I would like to see appear (Set), though there is plenty to keep folks busy — board games, a puzzle, decks of cards, even building toys. I’ll probably be knitting, so if you are the crafty sort and can bring your craft with you that’s encouraged too!

The goal of the Games Day is to be a place where you can drop by, meet folks, and have some fun. You do NOT need to be attending the conference! Just stop by when you have settled in. If you are looking for people to hang out with on Sunday, this is the place!

Tom Kyte speaks for about an hour on the newest features in Oracle 11g, including how many new features and enhancements there are. The presentation itself can be downloaded from Tom’s site and the video can be directly played in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/697/play or downloaded (170Mb) at http://technocation.org/node/697/download.

It’s always the little things in life. One of the things that has been a very “little thing” that causes a lot of frustration while writing The MySQL Administrator’s Bible is the prompt. Specifically, the fact that you can only change the first line of the prompt, but not the subsequent lines.

The default prompt that appears on the first line of the prompt is:
mysql>
The default (and unchangeable) second line of the prompt is four spaces followed by an ASCII arrow:
->

The second line of the prompt is hard-coded to match up very nicely with the first line in a fixed-width font:
mysql> SELECT
-> 1+2;
However, you can change the prompt, which is pretty handy:
mysql> prompt \d:
PROMPT set to '\d: '
(none): use test;
Database changed
test:


But remember, the second line of the prompt is unchangeable, which leads to a very ugly:
test: SELECT
-> 1+2;

This may not seem like a big deal. But for people that copy and paste examples (such as people double-checking their own work, a technical editor, or a reader), they might think to change the prompt, so they can copy and paste examples:
test: prompt /* mysql */
PROMPT set to '/* mysql */ '
/* mysql */ SELECT
-> "If I could change the second line, then I could copy and paste multi-line examples!";

This should be an easy enough fix for the MySQL client. At the very least the prompt should default to something commented, in my opinion.

Perhaps the Drizzle folks (or XtraDB from Percona) will pick up on this idea and have a default of something commented.

I am passing this along — I am not sure if most folks reading this can make it, as it is last-minute and in the Boston area, but I figured I’d let people know that the New England Database Society exists. It’s free, sponsored by Sun (and has been for years, long before Sun bought MySQL), and is hosted by my college database professor, Mitch Cherniack. (To that end, I should probably make sure to promote the Boston User Group here more often! I keep forgetting…)

You can find information on how to be a part of the mailing list at http://www.cs.brown.edu/sites/neds/

The next New England Database Society will be held on Friday, March 27 and the speaker is Christian Jensen of Aalborg University.

===================================================================
[N]ew [E]ngland [D]atabase [S]ociety
sponsored by Sun Microsystems, presents

Data Management for Location-Based Services

Christian S. Jensen
Center for Data-Intensive Systems
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University

Friday, March 27, 2009, 4:00 PM
Volen 101, Brandeis University
(preceded by a wine-and-cheese reception at 3:00, and followed by
dinner at 6:00)

Abstract:

The Internet is going mobile, and indications are that on a global
scale, the mobile Internet will be “bigger” than the conventional
Internet. This talk describes the motivation, status, and goals of an
ongoing research project and evolving system, called Streamspin, that
supports data management aspects of mobile Internet services.
Streamspin aims to power sites that enable users to create and share
geo-social services, and that are capable of delivering services to
millions of concurrent users. The talk covers two fundamental
services. The first supports the tracking of the continuously changing
positions of populations of mobile-service users. The second extends
the context of a user to include not only the user’s current location,
but also the user’s (anticipated) destination and route towards that
destination. If time permits, the talk will also cover issues to do
with privacy.

Speaker Bio:

Christian S. Jensen is a Professor of Computer Science at Aalborg
University, Denmark. His research concerns data management and spans
issues of semantics, modeling, and performance. He is an IEEE Fellow
and a member of the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences, the EDBT
Endowment, and the VLDB Endowment’s Board of Trustees. He received Ib
Henriksen’s Research Award 2001 for his research in mainly temporal
data management and Telenor’s Nordic Research Award 2002 for his
research in mobile services.

He is an editor-in-chief of The VLDB Journal and has served on the
editorial boards of ACM TODS, IEEE TKDE, and the IEEE Data Engineering
Bulletin. He was PC chair or co-chair for SSTD 2001, EDBT 2002, VLDB
2005, MobiDE 2006, MDM 2007, and TIME 2008.

He is currently on sabbatical at Google Inc., Mountain View. He works
in Google Research’s structured data group headed by Alon Halevy.

At the March Boston MySQL User Group meeting, Jacob Nikom of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory presented “Optimizing Concurrent Storage and Retrieval Operations for Real-Time Surveillance Applications.” In the middle of the talk, Jacob said he sometimes calls what he did in this application as “real-time data warehousing”, which was so accurate I decided to give that title to this blog post.

The slides can be downloaded in PDF format (1.3 Mb) at http://www.technocation.org/files/doc/Concurrent_database_performance_02.pdf. The 54 minute video can be downloaded (644Mb) at http://technocation.org/node/693/download or streamed directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/693/play.

This talk discussed how to do real-time retrieval operations while doing concurrent high volume insertion, including:

• How to keep up with 1.5 Mb/second per server incoming data stream
• 
  
• server hardware comparison between a multi-core AMD Opteron and a multi core Intel Xeon


• MySQL/Postgres comparison


• schema design


• design of the storage/retrieval benchmark


• tuning MySQL

Jacob showed the insertion time from the number of applied indexes. He also demonstrated the excellent responsiveness of the MySQL server both in simulated and actual surveillance.

At about 7 minutes into the presentation, Jacob begins to discuss “marshalling”, which is converting the XML to data and back. After the 20-minute mark, an audience member asks about what marshalling is, so I wanted to make sure that folks have the definition ahead of time.

As folks are making their plans to go to the MySQL User Conference, I just wanted to remind folks of the schedule of MySQL Camp.

One feature I put together for MySQL Camp but anyone can use is a restaurant list for the hotel area. There’s very little within walking distance, but many people will be local or will rent a car, so finding someone to drive with should not be a problem. The restaurant list is on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/SantaClaraRestaurants — updates are welcome!

About MySQL Camp: MySQL Camp is completely free, just walk on in and enjoy the sessions. All sessions are in the Bayshore room off the Mezzanine, and there will be signs directing you to the MySQL Camp room. I describe it as being like “an additional room for the MySQL Conference, but it’s free.” It also has some of the more technical, hands-on talks that did not make it to the conference.

Sunday, April 19th, 2009 from 12 noon until 12 midnight will be an informal gathering on the Mezzanine of the Hyatt (the conference hotel). We will have some fun, I will bring decks of playing cards and games that do not require a good grasp of English, as we are an international crowd. Bring yourself, your games, and maybe even your crafty things — I will probably be knitting or playing shorter games so I can meet people. Often folks want to meet old friends or new people, so whether this is your first conference or you’re a seasoned veteran, stop by! The Mezzanine is hard to miss, it is visible from the hotel lobby.

On Monday, April 20th from 9:00 am – 12:00 noon Mark Callaghan (Google) will be leading a hackfest. If you are not attending any tutorials this is a great opportunity to participate (or just listen and watch) in changing MySQL.

From 1:30 pm – 5:00 pm there will be an “Ask a Guru” session. Several well-known MySQL gurus will be around to answer your questions, whether they are theoretical or practical (ie, if you want to bring your laptop, and show your actual database, that’s acceptable). This is free — do not miss this!

Monday through Thursday starting at 10:50 am we will be having sessions, on the same schedule as the regular conference sessions. You can see the full list of sessions, including their descriptions, at the MySQL Camp Wiki Page. The titles and presenters are:

• Learning from others’ MySQL Performance Mistakes, Matt Yonkovit (Sun/MySQL, Waffle Grid, Big DBA Head)


• Intro to XtraDB, a Scalable InnoDB-based Storage Engine, Vadim Tkachenko (Percona)


• Grand Tour of the Information Schema and its Applications, Roland Bouman


• Setting up MySQL on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ronald Bradford (42SQL)


• NBD (MySQL Cluster) performance tuning and pitfalls, Yves Trudeau (Sun/MySQL, Waffle Grid, Big DBA Head)


• InnoDB Database Recovery Techniques, Peter Zaitsev (Percona)


• Chasing Bottlenecks, Morgan Tocker (Sun/MySQL)


• Running Two MySQL Instances Using One Installation, Christos Kalanzis


• Practical Object-Oriented Models in SQL, Bill Karwin


• Open Source for Newbies, Leslie Hawthorn (Google)


• Top 10 MySQL Pet Peeves and How to Workaround Them, Jeremy Zawodny


• DHT-based P2P storage engine for MySQL, Davi Arnaut (Sun)


• 8 Rules for Designing More Secure Applications Augusto Bott & Nicklas Westerlund (The Pythian Group)


• Test Drive MySQL 6.1, Peter Gulutzan and Konstantin Osipov (Sun/MySQL)


• Predicting Performance with Queuing Models, David Lutz


• Closing Keynote: The State of Open Source Databases Brian Aker (Sun)

If you are attending the conference and want to compare the sessions, the camp and conference sessions are listed together at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2009Notes.

In about 15 minutes, Giuseppe Maxia will begin a webinar in which the main focus is a presentation on “How to have a good presentation”. Talk about meta!

Giuseppe posted how to join the free webinar.

The slides can be found at http://datacharmer.org/downloads/2009_03_Presentation.pdf.

This is the 137th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Dave Edwards is enjoying a week off, and so as part of my plot to take over the world, I am writing this week’s Log Buffer.

First, the fun stuff: Josh Berkus tells us that the American English Translation of the Manga Guide to Databases is available in Japanese Fairies and Third Normal Form.

Then, the basics:
Giri Mandalika points to an article on Using MySQL with Java Technology. This is a basic article on how to connect, and does not go into all the wonders that Connector/J can really do. Speaking of basics, Decipher Information Systems has an article on Back to the Basics: Refreshing a Regular View Definition in SQL Server and Oracle. Chet Justice, the Oracle Nerd, writes about transactions in ORA-8177 Can’t Serialize Access For this Transaction. There is theoretical information about isolation levels that applies to all database systems. Mats Kindahl explains some transactional theory when talking about why Mixing Engines in Transactions in MySQL can get you into trouble.

It’s hard to get more basic than what data type to use for a single character – Matt Reid talks about VARCHAR, TINYTEXT and TINYINT in MySQL Data Type Q&A. In the Oracle world, Randolf Geist has a step-by-step HOWTO for Basic SQL Statement Performance Diagnosis. Grant Fritchey posts that Dissecting SQL Server Execution Plans, Chapter 3 is now available. Free e-books to help with query analysis? Awesome!

Backups are very, very important to a DBA. Amit Banerjee of the SQL Server FAQ blog shows How to Backup SQL Server Database to a Mapped Drive. If you’re using SQL Server cluster, check out John Daskalakis‘ article that answers What data should you backup from your SQL Server cluster? If you are using Oracle, you can read part two of Matt Canning’s Extracting DB files from RMAN using DBMS BACKUP RESTORE (part one is here).

If you are ready to go a bit further, Bryan Eisenberg says “Not Using Analytics? You are running out of excuses” and gives some helpful reasons to use analytics, as well as ways to get started, in Building an Optimization Culture by using analytics.

Are you on Oracle or SQL Server and thinking of migrating to MySQL? If so, Ronald Bradford’s presentation on Best Practices in Migrating to MySQL. Haidong Ji also has some tips on Moving Data from SQL Server to MySQL. Maybe you just want to upgrade — in that case, the wisdom of Jason Arneil should be handy — he attended an Oracle 11G Upgrade Workshop and posts about it, including a link to the slides from the workshop.

Most folks know about the concept of “drilling down” in reporting, but what about “drilling up?” John Minkjan has a brief article on OBIEE Simulating Drill Up with Oracle Business Intelligence. Over on the AMIS Technology blog, Lucas Jellema has an article on Using Flashback Query in Oracle SQL to Spot Changes and Compare Records. Guogen Zhang shows some DB2 Examples of Cascading XMLTABLE() in SQL/XML. And Dave Beulke post part two of DB2 Performance Summary, though I found that most of his advice was practical no matter what DBMS you use — for example, “Make sure that you are using the correct database design”, look for a lack of joins and full tablespace scans, etc.

And in Community news:
Susan Visser urges us to Join a Group, pointing out that Channeldb2.com has lots of videos, articles, photos, discussions, and even songs! Catherine Eibner discusses why
It Still Sux to be a Woman Working in IT. Personally I have not encountered many challenges, but I have only been in the field for 9 years. I certainly cannot deny the existence of the problems that many women do encounter, and as Catherine says:

International Women’s day is approaching next Friday the 6th of March, and I thought that perhaps sharing some of the challenges I have faced personally might help to start some discussions around what it is still like to work in the IT industry, to start to talk about why Girls are not studying Technology subjects at school and why so many women are not completing Technology based qualifications, preferring to transfer to other disciplines. Then, of the ones that do enter the IT workforce, so many leave once they reach their 30’s and why only a tiny fraction rarely ever make it to Senior Management.

As she says at the end of the podcast, “It’s time to talk about the issues and challenges we face, so we can start to fix them.” And speaking of podcasts, Brian “Bex” Huff lets us know that part one of a three-part Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Podcast has been released. And earlier in the week I posted the first Drizzle Podcast. And speaking of Drizzle, Barry Leslie announces that PBMS Supports Drizzle (PBMS is the PrimeBase Blob Streaming engine).

Eddie Awad shares Oracle Community Membership Statistics, and North America’s MySQL Community Engineer Dups explains the changes that have occurred and those to come for PlanetMySQL at Logins at PlanetMySQL? What’s Going On? Matt Casters links to a call for freenode.net donations. The direct link to donate is http://freenode.net/#donate (the donation button is on the upper-right side).

Finally, we end with some good news:
Anjo Kolk is the New Dutch Oracle ACE Director in Town and Allen Pang is now an Oracle Certified Master (OCM), and shares thoughts on How to Become an Oracle Certified Master.