Xaprb

I’ll be presenting several sessions at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011, which is April 11-14 in Santa Clara, California. I recommend this conference to anyone interested in open-source databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, CouchDB, MongoDB, and others. There is very good coverage of a diverse list of open-source databases.

My sessions are as follows:

• Building on Strengths, Learning from Differences: a keynote address on the open-source database ecosystem, how we got here, and what we can do to make the most of the future.
• Forecasting MySQL Performance and Scalability: mathematical models for forecasting performance and scalability that actually work and are not hard to do. (Example)
• The Aspersa System Administrator’s Toolkit: this is an under-appreciated toolkit at the moment, but it could be the next Maatkit.

In addition, I am listed as presenting Diagnosing and Fixing MySQL Performance Problems, a 3-hour tutorial on how to find and solve performance problems with swift and definite results. However, I actually have a scheduling conflict and a couple of my colleagues will present this instead.

O’Reilly’s 2011 edition of the MySQL conference has an expanded agenda, with good representation from Postgres, CouchDB, MongoDB, and others. Take a look at the full schedule listing, which is being filled out as talks are approved and the speakers verify that they’ll give the session.

I am certainly looking forward to this year’s event. A tremendous amount of progress has landed in GA versions of open-source databases this year. To name just a couple, there’s a new version of Postgres (9.0) with built-in replication and many more improvements; there’s MySQL 5.5 GA; there’s the HandlerSocket NoSQL interface to MySQL; Drizzle has a beta release; and the list goes on. I believe that this conference will have balanced and representative coverage of what’s really important to users. It isn’t dominated by any vendor this year; O’Reilly is running the conference independently, and the committee members represent a broad spectrum of databases themselves.

In short, I am happier than I’ve ever been about this great and unique conference. It’s definitely going to be the best year so far. Thank you O’Reilly for holding it, and thank you to all the great speakers, and thanks to all the companies who sponsor the event.

MongoDB, the Definitive Guide

MongoDB, the Definitive Guide, by Kristina Chodorow and Michael Dirolf, 2010. About 200 pages. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site.)

This is a good introduction to MongoDB, mostly from the application developer’s point of view. After reading through this, I felt that I understood the concepts well, although I am not a MongoDB expert, so I can’t pretend to be a fact-checker. The topics are clearly and logically presented for the most part; there is a small amount of repetition in one of the appendixes, but I don’t mind that. The writing and editing is top-notch, as I’ve come to expect from O’Reilly.

Read this book if you want to learn what MongoDB is, what it does, and how to use it. Don’t expect that you will learn everything there is to know about topics such as administration and tuning, although it’ll be a good start. (The MongoDB documentation is an excellent reference to continue your education in those areas.)

You might be pleasantly surprised at the lack of hype in this book. It wasn’t written by wide-eyed fanboys, and it does mention the weaknesses of MongoDB, although it understandably doesn’t spend any time bashing MongoDB for having shortcomings. I think you’ll get a balanced view of the database’s strengths and weaknesses, certainly enough to make a responsible decision about whether it’s worth investigating more deeply.

To sum up, as I wrote to the authors, “Nice book. Very well written, very clear and objective.”