Date: 2008-04-10 09:36 Subject: Arjen's pre-conf update: Dinner, Flickr, IRC, Quickpoll Security: Public

Zack is kindly humouring me, he's put up a new quickpoll on the MySQL dev zone (results) asking people what they're most looking forward to at the MySQL Conf. One of the choices is "Dinner with Arjen" ;-)
Thanks for the exposure, Zack! Of course it's not really just dinner with me, it's dinner with a great gang of MySQL Community people, about 30 at the time I'm writing this but new names adding all the time (well I often have to add them, since the forge wiki appears a tad broken on the login front right now - but I was registered and logged in already - I don't suppose Jay or Colin have time this week to fix up whatever's the prob there).
Even if you're not coming to the conf, perhaps you can join us Sunday night!

Mark Atwood created a Flickr group for photos (use the mysqluc08 tag), and I registered the #mysql-conf IRC channel on Freenode. All these resources are also listed on the main conf wiki page.

Date: 2008-04-10 09:51 Subject: Antony's pre-conf challenge: Lua stored procedures Security: Public

I set Antony Curtis (former MySQL colleague, and he recently moved to Google) a little challenge before the conf, can he make his external stored procedure framework support Lua? This will hinge on whether Lua is truly thread-safe and does not have evil mutexes hiding in its inner depths.

Antony responded that, if indeed it's thread-safe, it should only be a matter of hours. That'd be cool.... the standard stored proc language, while standard, is really nothing more than basic with a gross hangover. It's not pretty or flexible, writing longer procedures is like .... I dunno what would compare, but it's painful. The problem is just finding something threadsafe and small enough to get embedded, otherwise it requires external infrastructure. Lua would be ideal. We'll see!

Lua is of course also used in MySQL Proxy, and lots of other projects. It's *the* embedded scripting language of choice, just like if you need to embed a tiny SQL library, you pick SQLite.

Date: 2008-04-10 10:20 Subject: Nearly 10,000 entries at Planet MySQL! Security: Public

By the way, the entry counter at Planet MySQL stands at 9982. Which blogger will capture the illustrious 10,000th entry, and will MySQL hand out a prize? I think it's worthy, Planet MySQL has proven to be a great resource over the years.

Of course, there have been more posts, but prior to me setting up the current software infrastructure (March 2004), there was no archiving of old posts. Actually, it'd be great to be able to search the archives. Fairly simple to implement, MySQL Community team just needs to put the code out there so anyone external can do it. I'm happy to be embarassed (it's my code ;-) so no worries there.

But let's see, so it's been about 4 years, that's 2500 entries per year, about 48 entries per week. Not bad! I asked Lenz some time ago if he could run a query to show the trend of # of queries per week/month over time, also split out between MySQL employees, external community, aggregate other sources (the defined classes in the system). Should be very interesting to see. Again, if the code gets opened up, this is easy to do externally also.

(edited later to fix up the . -> , for thousands - see comments)

Date: 2008-04-10 23:19 Subject: Fewer MySQL books coming out? Security: Public

Just a subjective observation, been through a few bookstores this arvo (sorry, afternoon - Australian ;-) and I tend to do a quick check of the computer section to see what MySQL books are there.
It appears that over the last year or perhaps even longer, fewer new MySQL books have come out, and fewer MySQL books hang around on the shelves. Less interest, I don't know.
O'Reilly's annual report on the book market probably has some insight into this but it's late in the evening here so I'm not going to delve into that right now.
Anyway, it's quite possible that the market is fairly saturated, and there are some good books out there covering most features and uses. So all that remains is new functionality, and there hasn't really been that much which warrants writing a completely new book about it. Stored procedures was probably the last such instance. Like, partitioning is interesting, but not for a full book. Falcon, diddums (at least at this stage - perhaps at some point an internals book on falcon would be interesting, but probably not commercially viable). Lacking is a book on InnoDB Internals?

Of course there's the upcoming 2nd edition of High Performance MySQL, co-authored by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko, and myself. But again that's not a new book - strictly speaking, as it is pretty much redesigned/rewritten from scratch. It's not new in the sense that I doubt it would have been commissioned, had there not already been a very popular 1st edition out there.

Anyway, thoughts/opinions welcome. Like I said, it was just a subjective observation; may be right, may be wrong!