Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve been collecting a bunch of tabs, MySQL related, that I think people might have missed during the holiday period.

Contrarian Minds: Marten Mickos – this is a great interview with former CEO of MySQL, now SVP of the Database Group, at Sun Microsystems. Its got a bit of interesting history, and thoughts about the future. There’s also some interesting photography.

Facebook is now at 150 million users. They grew quite a bit recently, it was just 140 million about a month or two ago.

Flickr has seen traffic reaching ten terabytes. As you know, Flickr runs MySQL, and they make use of InnoDB. Recently, Chief Operations Officer, John Allspaw, showed how fragmented one of their databases was. Reminds us all, that running optimize from time to time, is useful. Flickr is also using MySQL 5.0.51 currently.

Flickr make extensive use of Ganglia. I found that there are Ganglia graphs for MySQL metrics available now. Interesting stuff.

Today, Dinesh pointed us out to the fact that MAMPU/OSCC saves RM40 million with open source. That’s about USD$12 million dollars!

I quote, from the report:

Savings on licensing fee alone by adopting OpenOffice.org have already exceeded RM12 million, which is based on the total installed seats of 12,760 at public sector agencies.

Also, from the same report:

The top three applications being considered by most Public Sector Agencies are:
1. OpenOffice.org — Office Suite
2. Firefox — Web Browser
3. MySQL — Database using Open Source Technology

That is impressive. OpenOffice.org and MySQL both come from Sun Microsystems Inc. Of course I’ve known this for a long time coming, but seeing it in B&W (ok, a colour report!) is of course, most useful. Go on, and read their first quarterly newsletter. More savings to come, I’m certain in 2009.

Raj Kissu is in the papers today. He completed a Google Summer of Code 2008 project with MySQL, hacking on blob streaming for phpMyAdmin. In fact, his project was so good, he has commit access to the phpMyAdmin tree :-)

Today, The Star had an article about him (and two other students), titled For the love of code. He said:

But Raj has already heard ­inquiries for his project. “A ­company that has developed a transactional engine using MySQL server have clients who want to test BlobStreaming,” he said.

Kudos Raj. I think we’ll see more great work from Paul McCullagh and Barry Leslie, as more happens with Scalable BLOB Streaming for MySQL happens.

In fact, Barry Leslie from PrimeBase will be speaking about blob streaming in his talk titled BLOB Streaming: Efficient reliable BLOB handling for all storage engines, at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009. What are you waiting for – register now and save! See you at CE2009!

I’ve always been more of a GNOME guy, and when running Linux, I use Rhythmbox to play my music. However, Amarok 2.0 might just change that.

They’ve chosen their database – it is none other than MySQL. The release notes state:

Some features, such as the player window or support for databases other than MySQL, have been removed because either they posed insurmountable programming problems, or they didn’t fit our design decisions about how to distinguish Amarok in a saturated market of music players.

If you want to know why the decision was made, read MySQL in Amarok 2 – The Reality. It has a lot to do with the fact that MySQL can be embedded, and performs well. Its a generally useful read to see why SQLite and PostgreSQL was not chosen.

MySQL… powering the music of today!
(wonder as I may, if we will ever get any Enterprise customers, who make heavy use of Amarok over many computers, etc… – I’m thinking modern night clubs, lounges, et al)

The one thing that has consumed my days (and nights) recently, has been the organising of the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 (hereinafter, referred to as the CE2009).

For starters, we’ve had 356 proposals. That basically provides a 1:3 acceptance:rejection ratio. So the voting committee had a really, really hard task to look at talks. Some even cross-referenced submissions with other submissions. Some even made suggestions of combining talks (successful, even). So my great thanks to the voting committee for the CE2009 – you guys all rock.

Then, once the voting committee has done the hard work, you’ve got to sanely schedule the talks. This is really, not an easy task. Very quickly, you realise that you want to be in all track, and you’ve got to split yourselves. This, being impossible, however, leaves room for the community (and in the past, Sheeri has done a great job at this, and I’m sure she’ll continue for the CE2009) to start making recordings. Good news is that we’re also looking into this, so it might be professionally done, for CE2009! Watch this space, for more details.

As of today, about 84% of the conference schedule is filled up. The tutorials are all 100% filled up. So come registration time, you can already be excited and start registering for your tutorials. And seeing most of the conference schedule, should be a positive thing, to help drive registrations.

Early registration is expected to open up sometime today. Early registrants, especially those that do so in December, I’m told will get a special gift.

The conference site even has features for you to now customise your own schedule. Even better, you can share this with others, if you choose (oh so, social networking :)). We also have a MySQL Conference & Expo Facebook Group.

Note: Some people are getting acceptance notes, and blogging, which is great. Some people are getting rejection notes, with discounts. And some people just aren’t getting any notes yet, because hey, we’ve got about 15% of the conference to fill up :-)

Anyway, this is your humble Program Chair, signing off for now.

Via Ditesh:

Interesting aside: the bus stopped in a ${RANDOM} town in Johor for food, and at the cashier, I spotted the cashier using KC POS which had a prominent “Powered by MySQL” text and the Sakila logo. Very cool!

This was a small town coffee shop, using a cash register, powered by the mighty Sakila. Similar to the chain of restaurants, Old Town White Coffee.

The whole blog post from Ditesh itself is interesting, but knowing you can find MySQL just about anywhere, showing the ubiquity of the database, just makes you proud to know, you work at/on/with MySQL.