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Yesterday I announced the MySQL Unconference. Some folks have asked about the MySQL Camp that both Giuseppe and I previously announced.

They are one and the same. In order to minimize confusion, I’ll change things to say “MySQL Camp” instead of “Unconference”. Apologies to those who were confused!

I am happy and pleased to announce the 2009 MySQL Unconference. The Unconference is a free conference that gives the community a chance to participate without having to incur the large expense of the official conference. Community members old and new will be on hand to speak, answer questions, give advice and generally help out. It will be taking place at the same time and place as the MySQL Conference and Expo — (well, almost the same time).

The grand scale details:
Sunday, April 19 2009 – Wed. April 22 2009 (the MySQL conference goes until Thursday)

The Hyatt Regency Santa Clara
5101 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara, CA 95054
USA

Phone: (408) 200-1234
Fax: (408) 980-3990

The Unconference will be held in the Bayshore room (on the hotel mezzanine).

When you make your travel plans, keep in mind that the Unconference starts with an informal games day on Sunday (see below for details). Travel information can be found on the MySQL Conference and Expo site at http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2009/public/content/hotel.

Currently registration is free, there is no registration process, and we are working out breakfast and lunch arrangements. These details may change (there may be a nominal fee for food, getting a pass to the Expo hall may require free registration, etc), so stay tuned for further details!

Scheduled sessions for the Unconference can be seen at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Conference_and_Expo_2009. There are many unscheduled sessions at this point, which are listed below.

On Sunday, April 19, 2009 from 12 noon until 12 midnight on the hotel mezzanine we will be having a game day. Play a game or just watch, and please bring your favorite game! People will drop in and out all day, so finding new and old friends to have dinner with will not be an issue. See the game day website to look at the list of games and add any you want to see or know you can bring.

On Monday, April 20, 2009 from 8:30 am – 12 noon a hackfest will take place. Mark Callaghan of Google will lead folks through choosing a feature to add to MySQL, teach the important details about how to hack MySQL, and then much hacking will happen!

From 1:30 pm – 5 pm we will feature an “Ask the Guru” session, where leading MySQL experts will be on hand to answer your questions. Ask something broad or specific, about theory or an actual use case. Want someone to look over a database schema? Optimize a query? Want to know why a certain error is occurring? Bring your questions, or just come to listen.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, April 21-22, 2009 from 10:50 am until 6 pm there will be 6 sessions per day, at the same time as the MySQL Conference sessions. Unfortunately, during the keynote time slots on both days the Unconference will be closed. However, Unconference attendees will be able to visit the Expo hall on Wednesday, to visit booths, get swag, etc.

Note that the Unconference sessions are not fully scheduled — there are plenty of sessions that are TBD, so that folks can sign up to speak on a topic at the conference. If you have an idea, feel free to e-mail awfief@gmail.com with your idea(s) and the time(s) you would like to present. This is not required; you can use the wiki to “sign up” for a time slot. However, I can help make sure that there are no similar conference talks at the same time, and help you refine your topic so it’s not too much for a 45-minute session.

Currently the following workshops are in the process of being scheduled for the Unconference:

Roland Bouman (XCDSQL Solutions / Strukton Rail, blog and blurb and Conference sessions) will be doing one workshop on “MySQL Plugins” and another on “MySQL UDF’s” (what they are, how to create them, etc).

Ronald Bradford (42SQL, website and blog and blurb and Conference sessions) will give a session on “Setting up MySQL on Amazon Web Services” (aka, AWS, using EC2). This session will take place at 3:05 pm on Tuesday, April 21st.

Leslie Hawthorn (Google, blog) will give a session on “Open Source for Newbies” (some time on Wed).

Christos Kalanzis (profile) will give a session on “How to run 2 instances of Mysql on the same machine using one set of binaries” at 3:05 pm on Wednesday.

Stewart Smith (Sun/MySQL, blog and Blurb and Conference sessions) will give a session on how different filesystems interact with MySQL.

Morgan Tocker (blog, Blurb and Conference sessions) – “Chasing Bottlenecks” — for beginner and intermediate DBAs. From Morgan: The best way to performance tune a system is to find out what your bottlenecks are, and attacking those first. In the first part of this session, I’ll be looking at some of the issues faced with common database workloads. From there, I’ll then be showing how you can get more information out of MySQL and your Operating System to find out about your workload.

Other topics that will happen, speakers TBD:
Drizzle
MySQL Cluster
Using bzr for source control

There will be a closing keynote at 5:15 pm on Wednesday, speaker TBD.

Wheel of protocol, turn turn turn.
Tell us the lesson that we should learn. (with apologies to the original source)

Writing a book comes with many challenges. For me, writing a MySQL book for MySQL beginners, who may or may not be database beginners, has fed my compulsion to research and test bizarre interactions.

Today’s lesson is on what protocol is used when connecting to a local mysqld instance on a non-Windows machine. The TCP/IP protocol is used by default when connecting on a Windows machine, and connecting from any operating system to a non-local mysqld instance. I am assuming the connections are being made by a command line client such as mysql, mysqladmin or mysqldump. Connections made via connectors such as Connector/J, an ODBC connector, DBD::mysql, etc are not covered in this post.

If you seem to be having trouble connecting, check your options against your intentions. Unexpected behavior is usually seen when your intention is to connect using TCP/IP, but the connection is using a socket file instead. Note the following behaviors:

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In a nutshell: What’s New in MySQL 5.1.

Release notes: Changes in release 5.1.x (Production).

And yes, very early on (at about two minutes in), I talk about my take on Monty’s controversial post at Oops, we did it again.

To play the video directly, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs4S7vONGMQ.

The slides can be downloaded as a PDF or in Open Office presentation (odp) format.
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A quiz, in 4 parts:

Given the following table definition in the sakila database:
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(The basics — comment here if you’d be interested to hear a non-partisan talk about the technical challenges faced by the IT team during the Obama campaign [particularly if you’re not an American who likes the idea of Obama as President, but even if you are].)

So, we all saw when Jonathan Schwartz posted this on election night:

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/change_has_come_to_america

Now, back in December 2001 one of the speakers at LISA (a system administrator’s conference) was a William LeFebvre, who spoke about what it was like to run CNN.com during the extremely high peak times of Sept. 11-12, 2001. I was not at that keynote speech, but I have heard a lot about it, including the fact that they were down to 85% capacity due to previously planned maintenance, that they diverted resources from all their other web properties except for the Cartoon Network’s website, so children had a place to go on the internet, etc.
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“There are 10 types of people in the world — those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”

The term “binary” in MySQL has many different meanings. How many can you come up with? I have 6, but I am willing to believe there are more!

0) “Binary distribution” is the name for the package that contains a binary. Another use is “binary installation” but that’s pretty much the same usage pattern as “binary distribution”, so I won’t count “binary installation” as a separate usage.
1) “Server binary” or “client binary” is the actual program (mysqld, mysql).
2) “Binary format” is a compressed format. For example, DECIMAL is stored in a “binary format” — each group of nine digits is compressed into 4 bytes.
3) “Binary log” is the change log. You can argue that this is an extension of #3, because the binary log is a compressed log, but “binary log” is encountered ubiquitously in the MySQL world, and “binary format” is somewhat obscure knowledge.
4) “Binary CHARSET” – sets the collation to be case-insensitive. For instance, utf8_bin and latin1_bin are the binary collations for the utf8 and latin1 character sets, respectively.
5) “Binary string” – a byte string. This is also known as the BINARY data type. There is some kind of wit/pun in the fact that a number in binary is actually a “bit string”.

Any more I missed? There are over 1600 mentions of the word “binary” in the 5.0 manual!

Brian Aker delivers the keynote speech at OpenSQL Camp: State of the Open Source Databases. The presentation begins with a disclaimer:
“There is no way I’m going to tell you exactly where the future of databases go. We have way too many egos in the room to ever even begin a discussion…”
and ends with Aker saying,
“What the hell does that mean?”

View the video online at
http://technocation.org/node/649/play
or download the 42.6 MB Flash video file (.flv) directly at http://technocation.org/node/649/download.

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The MySQL 5.1 GA Release will be on or about Dec. 6th, 2008.

How do I know?
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(one note, I have updated a previous blog post by adding the video for the LISA presentation I gave entitled “How to Stop Hating MySQL”)

OpenSQL Camp is in full swing! Baron Schwartz has done an amazing job organizing this free unconference.

We are well into the 2nd session of the day, and the quality of the presentations is excellent (though I expected that!) and it is always great to see people.

Some pictures….
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