Xaprb

I’m presenting about Maatkit, the toolkit I created to make life better with MySQL, at the MySQL conference next week.

I’m going to give you a whirlwind tour through some of Maatkit’s features and functionality. The toolkit is much too large and complex to cover more than a small part of it in depth. So here is your advance warning: I’m going to go through a lot of material, and I won’t be stopping for lengthy discussions :-) The Maatkit documentation is very thorough, and I hope to introduce you to things that could be of use to you, so you can go learn about those topics from the documentation.

Let me give you an idea: when I’m optimizing queries, I open up the output of mk-query-digest in Vim, navigate to the query I’m working on, CTRL-V to start visual selection mode, select the part of the query I’m interested in, type :!mysql -vr, press Enter, and I get my EXPLAIN, SHOW CREATE TABLE, or whatever pasted right into my file, which helps make a nice analysis report I can send to the client. I just skipped a lot of important information. Did I go too fast? Well, pretend you’re at the conference: now you know you want to go home, learn Vim, and use mk-query-digest for query analysis.

Having written about what I think is cool about the upcoming MySQL Conference and the MySQL Camp, now I want to finish up with what I’d like to see at the Percona Performance Conference. Just to recap, this is a conference we created to serve those who want to learn about performance — not “learn about MySQL,” not “learn about database performance,” just learn about performance, period.

I want to see everything. I think this is going to be the single best conference I’ve ever been to. Even the way the conference is organized is exciting. For example, it’s running from early morning till late at night, nonstop. The sessions are also (mostly) only 25 minutes. This means if you decide a session isn’t all that interesting, you didn’t spend much time on it, and you don’t have long to wait for the next one.

So here is a small sample of the sessions:

• CouchDB: Behind the Buzz (Jan Lehnardt)
• Performance Instrumentation: Beyond What You Do Now (Cary Millsap)
• Hive: Distributed Data Warehousing with Hadoop (Ashish Thusoo and Prasad Chakka, Facebook)
• High Performance Erlang (Jan Henry Nystrom)

These are not just people who’ve learned about something and want to talk at you. These are the inventors, the originators, the gurus. It is truly the who’s who, and that’s just a few of them. If you aren’t familiar with those names, Google them and see. And after that, why not Google Theo Schlossnagle, Eric Burton, Monty Widenius, Andrew Aksyonoff, and a few others.

I hope to see you there. Bring your business cards and introduce yourself to me!

It’s a feature preview with many limitations, but this is still good news. This has been a pretty severe performance limitation for replication in MySQL, which has prompted many a workaround.

Interestingly, the feature preview is based on MySQL 5.1, which has recently seemed to be getting some significant changes even though it’s a GA release. Does this signal a change to MySQL’s release cycle, which has sometimes been characterized as too long? More good news?