For the past many years, there’s been a conference in April, at the Santa Clara Convention Centre where the topic has been MySQL and the surrounding ecosystem. The first year I went, I gave a talk on the new features in MySQL Cluster 5.1 to a overflowing room of attendees. For me, it’s an event that’s mixed with speaking about something I’ve been working on and talking to other attendees about everything from how a particular part of the server works to where we can escape to for nearby good vegan food.

So, I thought I’d share some of the sessions that I’m really looking forward to. My selection is probably atypical, but may be interesting to others. I’m not going to list the keynotes, although they are often of a lot of value. I’m also going to attempt to avoid listing a few really awesome well known speakers simply because there are other really interesting sessions that also need exposure!

• Starring Sakila: Building Data Warehouses and BI solutions using MySQL and Pentaho
  I need to base decisions off data, not simply a gut feeling (I’m not Stephen Colbert after all). I ran into a bunch of stumbling blocks when trying to work with Pentaho a couple of weeks ago, and I’m really hoping that this session shines some light on how to use it to better and more easily make arguments based on evidence to others in the company.
• Testing MySQL Databases: The State Of The Art
  I’ve worked with Patrick for several years now, and he’s currently a valuable member of my team at Percona. For those who are interested in the state of the art of open source database testing, this is the session to be in.
• Getting InnoDB Compression Ready for Facebook Scale
  This session is on at the same time as I’m speaking, so I probably won’t be able to attend (people keep coming to my sessions so I usually can’t sneak out). I’m really interested in how they’ve modified the compression code to help with their (large) workload.
• Backing Up Facebook
  I hear that Facebook has a couple of database servers, a few dozen users and a few floppy disks full of data. This should be a fun story :)
• Introducing XtraBackup Manager
  Being responsible for XtraBackup development at Percona, the XtraBackup topics really interest me. Lachlan has been working on a simple backup manager for XtraBackup to help create something that is a more complete backup solution than a tool which simply creates a backup.
• Extending Xtrabackup – A Point-In-Time System
  Another good case of using XtraBackup as part of a comprehensive backup strategy. I have to be honest, I’m looking for ways in which we can improve XtraBackup to better fit the needs of people. It may be that there are a few small things we can do to make it easier for people do deploy and use.
• Getting Started with Drizzle 7.1
  We’re about to do the 7.1 release of Drizzle! If you’re interested in having a SQL database that is designed to be used in large scale web applications and cloud environments, come along to this talk.
• MySQL Idiosyncrasies That Bite
  I have to admit, I’m interested in Ronalds talk here to basically ensure we didn’t miss fixing anything in Drizzle. I do promise not to at any point yell out “Fixed in Drizzle” though.

Go here to register: http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2012/ (early bird pricing and discounted hotel rooms end March 12th, so you want to register sooner rather than later).

At Percona, we’re now using sphinx for our documentation. We’re also using Jenkins for our  continuous integration. We have compiler warnings from GCC being parsed by Jenkins using the built in filters, but there isn’t one for the sphinx warnings.

Luckily, in the configuration page for Jenkins, the Warnings plugin allows you to specify your own filters. I’ve added the following filter to process warnings from sphinx:

For those who want to copy and paste:

Regex: ^(.*):(\d+): \((.*)\) (.*)

Mapping Script

import hudson.plugins.warnings.parser.Warning

String fileName = matcher.group(1)
String lineNumber = matcher.group(2)
String category = matcher.group(3)
String message = matcher.group(4)

return new Warning(fileName, Integer.parseInt(lineNumber), "sphinx", category, message);

Example log message: /home/stewart/percona-server/docs-5.1/doc/source/release-notes/Percona-Server-1.0.2-3.rst:67: (WARNING/2) Inline literal start-string without end-string.

Then I can select this filter from the job that builds (and publishes) our documentation and it shows up like any other compiler warnings. Neat!

TODO: get the intersphinx warnings also in there

TODO: fix the linkcheck target in Sphinx so that it’s easily parseable and can also be integrated.

Up until November 2008 (that’s 3 years and 11 months for those playing at home) I worked on MySQL Cluster. Still love the product and love how much better we’re making Drizzle so it’ll be the best SQL interface to NDB :)

The ideas behind Drizzle had been talked about for a while… and with my experience with internals of the MySQL server, I thought that some change and dramatic improvement was sorely needed.

Then, in 2008, Brian created a tree. I was soon sending in patches at nights, we announced to the whole world at OSCON and it captured a lot of attention.

Since November 2008 I’ve been working on Drizzle full time. It was absolutely awesome that I had the opportunity to spend all my days hacking on Drizzle – both directly with fantastic people and for fantastic people.

But… the Sun set… which was exciting and sad at the same time.

Never to fear! There were plenty of places wanting Drizzle hackers (and MySQL hackers). For me, it came down to this: “real artists ship”. While there were other places where I would no doubt be happy and work on something really cool, the only way I could end up working out where I should really be was: what is the best way to have Drizzle make a stable release that we’d see be suitable for deployment? So, Where Am I Now?

Rackspace.

Where I’ll again be spending all my time hacking Drizzle.