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It cost a billion dollar and indeed the favorite among us , Yes dude, Its MySQL, back in town rock & roll. But at least for me, It seems not so new in town. I crushed David as Keynote speaker back few month ago in Sun Tech Days, and surprise, this bald guy is back again in Hyderbad and this time, with his gangs with different – He being less savvy and more evangelist, carried some marketing fundas. Like a priest preaching, for all this, Sun got a new funky title to call – India Shock Tour ‘08.

Shock Tour certainly was Shocking. Andhra State was in mood of election. Some speculation among organizer was — less delegates and bit of disappointment. Thats never gonna happen, especially when you are in Hyderabad. Literally, you find millions of programmers and thousands of companies rattling in heavy dense concrete city Hyderabad.

I personally never seen MySQL running after gimmicks, until this day, shouting features upon features, clients upon clients, reason upon reasons. The first session screamed with lots of Marketing buzzwords — how MySQL rocks, how rest sucks? There was one interesting slides shows the Enterprise Edition also available in GPL. None the less the recent changes in their decision gives some impression that all the features are avails in Enterprise edition also come under Community Edition. I saw alpha stage product MySQL proxy, which seems to be quite interesting to scale and load balancing the MySQL server. And As it happens all marketing world, you see lots of custom tools with overhyped features.

The 2^nd session was kinda awaking. A little depth overview on the storage engine that powered MySQL. David Axmark, Co-founder of MySQL, has to say lots of hell and heaven about storage engines. I personally have two choices in MySQL. I never thought of giving a single try to archive or Black hole or MySAM++ or Falcon. They are really new to me and I have no need of them. Like ordinary people, I have just used MyISAM and InnoDB. In the past, All the sudden fuss about acquiring InnoDB by Oracle had hit the headlines. There was dilemma whether MySQL intact with InnoDB or find some good alternatives. InnoDB till this date a only ACID-compliant transaction engine in MySQL which officially owned by Oracle and gave as a gift to the Open world. MySQL+InnoDB is no doubt an ubiquitous combination. There is no promising alternatives for it. David gave some picture on groundbreaking alternatives like Falcon engine. Which is not yet stable. Falcon is another transactional storage engine, based on Netfrastructure database engine, extended and integrated into MySQL, aimed at modern multicore machine with large memory. David flashed some other storage engines like Cluster/NDB, Archive, Memory, Blackhole, Myria (MySAM++). He gave details about each engine. Why and How we should select the correct engine? I really love MySQL being such an unique product which has ability to plugin any types of storage engine. David was referring that there are number of company, lets say one in a thousand, who writes their storage engine and plugin inside MySQL, avoiding reinvent the spinning wheel of SQL interface cycle, he gave one instance, a Google, secret engine that is being used in MySQL. He revealed the fact that Yahoo! runs entirely on MySQL, NASA and so on and so forth. David paused on one slide and mentioned very thoroughly How Swedish National Police decided to migrate its proprietary based database into MySQL and How it cut costs and reduce the risk of vendor lock-in while maintaining the high reliability and security inherent in police work. Swedish Policed saved 50 per cent compared to the proprietary solutions. So, guys what our Police is running upon?

Third session..! Its too long but nerds never mind to listen it. Just make sure the stuffs that matters. Sounds slashdot right! He is the guy worked aggressively in slashdot in past. Brian Aker, a hacker and now a Director of Architecture in MySQL. He is a force behind few storage engine recently made some headlines. Archive, Blackhole and Federated storage engine are few example Aker has contributed. Noticeably, he is also attached with memcached and other various Apache modules project. The session tags with “MySQL replication and Clustering in Web”, Sure he does have that in Slashdot days and I felt its worth to have it though I have nothing to scale right now but I love do it.

His long way round talks on Clustering were superb and they way he mention about the types of cluster, replication and the experience he shared he had in past was praiseworthy. Achieving true scalability, high availability, fault tolerance is costly game. Though MySQL has its own ways to make it happen. Brian gave lots of examples from theoretical and practical point of view. Clustering and replication are not so old features in MySQL. It is indeed the ultimate features to scale the MySQL in precise manner. He gave few hints selecting right Storage Engine,  Storage device (i.e SSD)  to scale better and faster clustering is also one key factor..

The session was pretty long, almost an hour, We had a break in between. I got an opportunity to talk with David and also managed couple of snaps with him. He asked whether MySQL has some user in Nepal? He had never been there before but has got chance in Dharmasala, which I believed, he hardly knows where Nepal locates. He seems to be quite impressed to find that there are hardcore followers in LAMP stack. I intimated him that Its even popular among other platform. Its an ubiquitous. I interrupt David and made quick comment on recent controversial decision making couple of features closed source that only avails in paid version. Though the decision was reverted back but why at the first place MySQL and Sun took this decision. To my surprise, David revealed that The decision was taken by the team not the Sun. Sun actually came up with the idea to release it as opensource. So guys, flush up your mind, Believe it yourself Sun is a real FOSS’an. The only one big enterprise who endorse GPL. Guess what If OpenSolaris in GPL’ed, seamlessly, both Linux and Solaris gonna rock the industry like anything.

The next session quickly kicked off. As you have noticed, Brian and David, were the only two speakers, took the session back and forth. This time Brian was one on one. The session entitled “Memcached”. He began with a question, “Who is using memached in large scale ?”..No response. He reacted it as if he had asked this question in Europe, he could have got 50% of the total user hands up! Thats sounds India still far behind in memcached and they damn care about it. This really reflects an example that manager are unfamiliar with the product which has made deep impact in the biggest site. Memcached actually originated from livejournal.com to solve their cache issue in distributed manner, eventually now used very aggressively in Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Mixi (JP site), Grazr and list goes on and on. Brian gave few graphs statistics based on Mixi loads and showed how it scaled well with memcached to tolerate millions of Japanese traffic hours by hours. He gave technical inside on memcached i.e the slab memory allocator, usage of libevent, the damn simple protocol, internal hash table and blah blah..He gave some overview on Client side too. Memcached scale in thousands of thousands server and I find it really encouraging to use in one of the highly traffic website in India and Nepal. Here any admins reading just try memcached and see the difference.

The final session from David and Brian was on MySQL Performance Tunning Tips, this is all about making MySQL faster and responsive. There are hell of tips we get it out from google, but the tips that you get straight out from the creator mouth are so different that you really have to think about it. I got many new tips that I have hardly cared about. I could have written right here but afraid being messing up with more tips, less the journal.

MySQL is empowering Internet and certainly the whole damn world loves it.

Kudos! To all MySQL team!