Xaprb

I wrote previously about what I’m looking forward to at the upcoming MySQL Conference (next week!). Now I want to write about the free, community-organized unconference being held concurrently, MySQL Camp 2009.

It runs from Sunday through Thursday of next week, which is even longer than the MySQL conference. It starts Sunday with a day of games, then there are really good sessions throughout the week. In fact, I daresay the schedule is at times more interesting than the main MySQL conference:

• Hackfest with Mark Callaghan.
• Ask a guru. Free advice from really expensive consultants!
• Presentations from “big name” speakers, such as the BigDBAHead pair, Jeremy Zawodny, and people from Percona.
• Predicting Performance with Queuing Models with David Lutz. (Think this doesn’t sound interesting? I bet you will change your mind if you go see.)

And a lot more. If you’re in the Bay area, you should really make an effort to come out and attend this. I’ve attended the first two MySQL Camp events, and you can read about them in my blog archives. Well worth going to, and did I mention there is no cost at all?

This is really cool. I just learned this: you can treat a Perl variable just like a filehandle (read, write, etc).

my $buffer = "";
open my $fh, ">", \$buffer or die $OS_ERROR;
print $fh "hello, world\n";

Now $buffer contains “hello, world\n”. You can do the same kinds of things when reading from a variable.

I knew you could do it with IO::Scalar, but while refreshing my memory on that, I stumbled upon this — who needs IO::Scalar anymore?

This is going to make a lot of tests in Maatkit easier to write.

I haven’t really decided my schedule yet during the conference, but I thought I’d mention these sessions that look interesting to me.

I’m presenting a session on how to use Maatkit, which I think attendees will get a lot of benefit from.

• Tuesday
  • This is Not a Web App: The Evolution of a MySQL Deployment at Google (keynote). Mark Callaghan, need I say more?
  • MySQL and Search at Craigslist. Jeremy has gotten back into technical work after a career at Yahoo! that seemed to lead him away from his heart’s desire. I’d like to hear about the things he’s done, especially since I understand it involves replacing a lot of overloaded MySQL machines with a few underloaded Sphinx machines.
  • Distributed Innodb Caching with memcached. Matt and Yves have been doing really ground-breaking work here. It might not seem revolutionary, but it is: they’re dipping their toes into the future when optimizing code for slow, sequential-access disks is a crime.
  • Rethinking MySQL, Enter Drizzle. I doubt I’ll be able to get in the door for this one.
  • If You Love It, Break It: Testing MySQL with the Random Query Generator. Ah, that sounds nifty.
  • The PBXT Storage Engine: Meeting Future Challenges. I continue to watch PBXT keenly. IMO it is one of the key storage engines of the future.
  • Advanced Query Manipulation with MySQL Proxy. Proxy is a tool that’ll only become more useful in the future, too.
  • Introduction to Using DTrace with MySQL. I’d like to learn about DTrace.
  • Solving Common SQL Problems with the SeqEngine. It’s Beat Vontobel — he always amazes and delights the audience.
  • MySQL Proxy Meets: Binlogs. Hmm, I think there’s a lot going on behind the scenes here. I think Jan is being shy and has something really nifty to unwrap.
  • Understanding and Control of MySQL Query Optimizer: Traditional and Novel Tools and Techniques. Sergey’s talks are always interesting for true propeller heads.
  • Faster Data Reduction and Smoothing for Analysis & Archival in MySQL. I think a lot of my clients could benefit from this!
• Wednesday
  • The Percona Performance Conference. From 8:30 AM to 10:30 PM, and I think every single session is a must-see. But I’m biased, because I helped pick sessions.
  • Using Q4M: A Message Queue Storage Engine for MySQL. Queues are one of the hardest design patterns to scale with traditional techniques. Anyone who has a queue (jobs to process, comments to moderate, articles to approve, clicks to aggregate, “stuff to do and then mark as done”) should get something from this.
  • libdrizzle: A New Client Library for Drizzle and MySQL. I really think the Drizzle developers’ work will have far-reaching impacts.
  • Monitoring 101: Simple Stuff to Save Your Bacon. What it says.
  • High Availability and Scalability Patches from Google. Good luck fitting in the door on this one, too.
  • SAN Performance on a Internal Disk Budget: The Coming Solid State Disk Revolution. More from Matt Yonkovit.
  • Innodb Database Recovery Techniques. Obligatory plug — Peter Zaitsev.
  • MySQL Performance on EC2. Mark Callaghan? Mark Callaghan! But I have not a clue about this one. I didn’t know he was into EC2. Google doesn’t outsource their infrastructure, do they?
  • There are several time slots on Wednesday when there is nothing of great interest to me. I will be at the Maatkit dot-org booth in the expo hall during this time, or maybe at the Percona conference.
• Thursday
  • More Percona Performance Conference. Fill your brain! More, more, more!
  • Deep-inspecting MySQL with DTrace. I can’t decide whether this or the earlier one is likely to be better. Domas is a wizard.
  • Map/Reduce and Queues for MySQL Using Gearman. Gearman is something I have my eyes on — either that or Spread. For a secret project.
  • MySQL Support Internals. They run a world-class operation and they’re my competition.
  • Dormando’s Proxy for MySQL. Just because.
  • Advanced Master-Slave Replication with Tungsten Failover. I keep meaning to evaluate this, but haven’t had time.
  • Memory Management in MySQL and Drizzle. A specialized topic, and Stewart knows a lot of stuff.
  • memcached Functions for MySQL: Seemless Caching in MySQL. There’s a lot of neat stuff here.
  • MySQL Row Change Event Extraction and Publish. From Google. What else are they up to?
  • InnoDB Performance and Usability Patches. By Vadim. This is a must-see for anyone who wants leading edge InnoDB features and performance. Percona’s work isn’t very well documented (yet) so this will be a great way to learn about the stuff we’ve done that you might not otherwise find out.
  • SPIDER Storage Engine: Database Sharding by Storage Engine. This one is interesting. It looks like Federated with parallelism and potentially other features. I looked at the source, but it is really unclear to me what it does, and there is nary a comment to be found.
  • Make Your Life Easier with Maatkit. I think I’ll attend this one, since I’m presenting.

I’ll be spreading my time out over a lot of different things, and I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep at the conference, so I’ll have to see what I can fit in. But these are the sessions I think look the most interesting.