Stoner's World

I was able to attend OpenSQLCamp 2008, even while under the influence of DayQuil, jetlag (spent the week in Santa Clara), 3 hours of sleep and a 2 hour drive. Then there’s folks like Arjen who flew across 15 times zones and was still coherent – I guess I’m just not cut out for lots of travel in short time spans. Oh well.

The un-conference was great. You didn’t have the distractions of vendors with big obnoxious displays promising the sun/stars/moon, sales droids trying to peddle wares, marketing puppets who still think vendor lockin is a great strategy – just some really smart folks getting together, sharing what they’ve learned and collaborating. People from MySQL, Drizzle, Postgres and SQLite were there.

Brian Aker’s keynote was insightful. I liked the sticker on his laptop: “My other computer is a data center.” Vadim’s session on the Percona patchset helped illustrate what patches they include in MySQL and why. A particularly good side-conversation in the session was Brian highlighting a need for someone to pick up management of the InnoDB code. Since InnoDB is developed behind closed doors, someone can step up and put up a mailing list so the community can coordinate 3rd party patches into a single, cohesive code base. provide for a community-driven time-line of features, fixes, etc. The Oracle/InnoBase developers would be most welcome however their lack of communication in the past has necessitated this.

Arjen’s OurDelta session explained what the OurDelta project is about and how it works behind the covers. For me, this highlighted, in my mind, how MySQL is becoming fractioned due, in part, it MySQL’s/Sun’s development strategy. With such long time lines between releases, many patches containing fixes and features are put out there by the community and different people are bundling the patches and releasing new versions. OurDelta and Percona are the prime examples. They don’t always include the same patches in their releases. In all honesty, calling OurDelta or Percona’s distributions “MySQL” is misleading and leads to confusion. They are derivitive works based on MySQL’s code – forks.

Jay Pipe’s Join-Fu talk was entertaining. Besdies learning what really annoys Jay (the phrase “chaps my ass” was used a lot,) I learned a bit about the internals of MySQL that I can directly apply. I did not know that stored procedures were compiled and cached on a per-connection basis, not across all connections. This can have serious performance implications.

Dr. Richard Hipp’s talk on How SQL Database Engines Work was good. It revealed the good and bad of retrieving data from indexes and data tables. After the talk, one is almost left wondering how in the world databases work at all given the how extremely complex data retrieval can get. Yay smart people!

Peter Zaitsev filled in for Piotr Biel for the Sphinx talk. I had heard Patrick Galbraith discuss Sphinx during a MySQL Webinar on memcached UDFs a few weeks ago so I was just refreshing what I had already learned.

Kelly McDonald presented their work on developing a complete auditing system in Postgres for all database activity (or activity on the tables they were interested in.) Auditing systems can be annoying to develop so it was good to see how they did it. With a little C code and some triggers, they were able to identify all data changes down to the end user submitting the changes, including the web session – all vital for debugging problems in today’s complex web applications.

Finally, I sat in on the Lightning talks. Giuseppe Maxia gave a demonstration of the MySQL Sandbox. I’d heard about it but was impressed with the simplicity it affords. Ronald Bradford put out feelers for MySQL monitoring (what people use, what people should use, what should get monitored, etc.) Baron showed how to create snapshots using LVM for purposes of backing up MySQL. There were others but my head was quite fuzzy and sleepy with the onset of the Food Coma from lunch.

Hackathon. Sadly, I was feeling too crappy to drive back to Charlottesville to attend the hackathon on Sunday.

Thanks to Baron for dreaming this up and actually setting the wheels in motion. If you missed it, you missed out.