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.

So far this year I’ve been totally silent about the MySQL Conference and Expo 2009. In the past I’ve been a vocal advocate of going to the conference and sending your employees to the conference. So my silence was conspicuous to me, if not to you. I’ve always considered myself a strong MySQL supporter and I still do.

Why wasn’t I telling people to go to this year’s conference? Simple: I can’t in good conscience tell people to attend an event from which I’ve been excluded (oh, the irony). So I stayed quiet while MySQL employees told people to read my article about how to get a session accepted to the MySQL conference. More irony. It is not my way to remain silent, but circumstances demanded it.

But now I’m back! My colleagues and I will be there, and now I’m advocating for your attendance there, as ever. You should come to the conference, and you should consider attending the Percona Performance Conference at the same time so you can learn about more than just MySQL (and see the “missing sessions” that weren’t accepted).

And for the record, I never pressured anyone to accept my sessions. I just stayed silent. That’s what polite people do when they’re not on the guest list: they just find another party.