Colin Charles Agenda

In what I think must be MySQL’s first time in the Philippines, there will be a presence there next week. Well, its not the first time, but in terms of a community/developer event, I think it might be. The Sun Tech Days is happening from 17-19 June 2008, in the Shangri-La Makati.

Besides MySQL, expect great talks on NetBeans, GlassFish, OpenSolaris, and so much more. I’ll be the guy walking around in the MySQL shirt, so feel free to stop me and ask questions. Its exciting for me, as we’ve not really paid much attention to the Philippines, in terms of community growth (and the Philippines is in the APAC region!).

This isn’t a free event (its 1,000 PHP = ~USD23), and registration should still be available. If you’d like to meet up, and talk MySQL, shoot me an email at colinATmysqlDOTcom or reach me via mobile at +6-012-204-3201. If you’d like to help organise a MySQL Meetup in Manila, do ping me too.

At the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, Britt Crawford and Justin McCarthy, both from Cafepress.com, gave us a very interesting talk on scaling with HiveDB. I took a few notes (pasted below), their slides are online (warning: 6.1MB PDF), and if you’re after their abstract its available as well.

I also took a video of them (refer to Slide 12, for the IRC conversation):

The quick notes:

• OLTP optimised (as it serves cafepress.com)
• Cannot lock tables, or take it offline
• Constant response time is more important than low latency (little slower query is ok, just not exponentially slower)
• Queries run might return wildly sized result sets.
• There can be growth and usage hotspots. You cannot predict this at all.
• Partition by key (the set of all partition keys is the partition dimension)
• Partitioned Hibernate from Google (Hibernate Shards). HiveDB is now married up with shards.
• Thought about MySQL Proxy to support high availability components, but it was dismissed

Do you use mod_auth_mysql, the Apache module that allows authentication of users to happen through a MySQL database?

If so, the nice folk at Automattic (makers of fine blogging software like WordPress) have released a patched version that works with phpass.

With this, you can now have single sign on (SSO), with authentication against a WordPress blog (or bbPress forum). Note that WordPress (in 2.5 and later), doesn’t use MD5 hashes to store passwords any longer; instead they are salted and hashed with the phpass library. The Automattic folk use this to provide SSO for Trac and Subversion.

Read Barry’s announcement, and grab the patched mod_auth_mysql.

MySQL is featured on the Google Open Source Blog
Just after leaving JavaOne, Leslie pinged me on IRC to inform me that the MySQL project was featured on the Google Open Source blog. Go on, read Moments of Inspiration.

In other news from mentors, Colin Charles, former mentor and 2008 organization administrator for MySQL dropped a note to let us know that their Community Bonding period is moving along swimmingly. So well, in fact, that their students are already delivering weekly status reports. Colin mentioned that their student Filippo Bollini had crafted a particularly well written update; it’s worth checking out for mentors wondering what sorts of information to collect from students or for students wondering what kind of details are most useful to their mentors.

Congratulations Filippo. I expect great things from you (as does Brian.)

Start your engines!
Students, and mentors alike, this is the week that the Summer of Code starts! Well, coding anyway. Its very encouraging to see all the weekly reports flow in, and once I catch a breath, I’ll be summarising them for all to see and keep up with how the MySQL SoC students of 2008 are doing.

We haven’t had a MySQL University session in a while (a semi-spring break?), but tomorrow’s session (May 8) should be real interesting. MySQL Cluster developer, Stewart Smith, will host a session titled Getting Started Using NDB. It will happen on May 8, at 13:00 UTC.

One of the most common queries I receive is from people wanting to install or get started with NDB usage (ok, strictly speaking, they want to “cluster” MySQL, and I’m happy Stewart is using the word “NDB” which refers to the storage engine). All in all, it should be a great session, so I encourage you to join in the festivities.

Lucky for me, 13:00 UTC equates to 06:00 PST, while I’m in San Francisco. So I should definitely attempt to be there.

As you all know, MySQL is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2008. Its the community bonding period now, and real work only starts on May 26 2008.

Just a couple of highlights:

• Raj Kissu Rajandran, a student at APIIT, in Malaysia, is the first Malaysian to participate in the MySQL project. I was under the impression that he was the first Malaysian in general, but it turns out that that he has competition in another project as well… He’s mentored by Marc Delisle from phpMyAdmin, but also has a co-mentor that is Ronald Bradford from PBXT/PrimeBase. Interest stuff.
• Filippo Bollini, mentored by Brian Aker, has already started writing weekly reports, and has a most impressive week 2. Read it. Its comprehensive.

With Filippo’s amazing weekly reporting structure, I believe all the other students have a big task ahead of them to keep up :)