The conference is over, and it was a great week but pretty exhausting! From what I saw, and from what I have heard the sessions were of a very high standard this year. I have come back with a number of new ideas and quite a few things I would like to implement in PBXT. One of these is new online backup API for MySQL which will enable you to make a snapshot backup of data stored by all engines, and do point in time recovery.
For me the week started off with the BoF on scalable BLOB streaming on Tuesday evening. The BoF was well attended and there was significant interest in the topic. I will be reporting on some of the issues discussed soon.
On Wednesday morning I presented: PrimeBase XT - Design and Implementation of a Transactional Storage Engine. I was pleased with the number of questions, interest and feedback I received.
When I mentioned to Mårten Mickos that someone had said it was the best session they had heard so far at the conference, Mårten told me that they pay guys to say this to the speakers so that they feel good! So I must thank MySQL for this very thoughtful gesture - joke, of course ;)
Thanks also to Sheeri Kritzer for video recording the talk so I hope to get a link to that soon. In the meantime I have posted my slides to the PBXT home page:
http://www.primebase.com/xt/download/pbxt_mysql_uc_2007.pdf
After that I also took part in 2 lightning rounds sessions: Top MySQL Community Contributors and State of the Partner Engines. Both sessions were interesting in their diversity. One of the top contributors, Ask Bjørn Hansen, described how meeting his goal of filing a bug a week was a lot easier in the early days of MySQL. However, more recently he has been helped by the current state of the GUI tools!
During the Partner Engines session, it came as a surprise to some people in the audience that not all engines are for free. Actually there is a wide spectrum from GPL over partially free to highly priced. In fact, one of the developers of a data-warehousing engine found the question as to whether it may be free quite amusing. Solid has not decided to what extent it high-availability offering will be commercial, and the Amazon S3 engine is free, but the service behind it not. So that's something to watch out for in general.
I took the opportunity during the Partner Engines session to mention our plans for the future of PBXT which involve building a scalable BLOB streaming infrastructure for MySQL. This is relevant to a number engine developers as we will be providing an open system which will enable all engines to stream BLOBs directly in and out of the server. So please check out blobstreaming.org for more details.
2 comments:
Paul, great blog posting, and just a note: I said that OTHER conference organisers have been known to tell every speaker that he/she was the best (it has happened to me).
We don't do that at MySQL. :-)
Marten
Hi Marten,
Yes, I remember you mentioned that too.
I admit, it's not very funny if something like that really happens!
Thanks for a great show! :)
Post a Comment