The MySQL council advocates for the MySQL community, and needs community leaders to help address issues such as keeping the bug database open and keeping the user conference from fragmenting.  The council tries to help solve issues that the community faces with Oracle, IOUG, or anyone else.  The council comprises four to six members representing a mix of consultants, volunteers, community activists, developers, and vendors.  The council is not meant to replace any existing grass roots organizations, rather it may be helpful for gaining visibility for their issues.

As a council member, you would be asked to participate in meetings (they’ve been about once a month by phone, but there may be a face-to-face meeting).  You will also be asked to help promote speaking and volunteering communities.  The term of office is one calendar year, and you receive a one-year IOUG membership, discounted event registration, and a “MySQL Council” pin.

Please consider applying via this IOUG link.

This talk will be academically-oriented (not much marketing).  The abstract is as follows:

Most storage systems employ B-trees to achieve a good tradeoff between the ability to update data quickly and to search it quickly.  It turns out that B-trees are far from the optimimum in this tradeoff space. I’ll talk about Fractal Tree indexes, which were developed in a collaboration between MIT, Stony Brook, and Rutgers.  I’ll talk about how they work, and what their performance bounds are.  My startup, Tokutek, is commercializing fractal tree indexes as part of a MySQL storage engine.

The slides are here.

I recently gave a talk at Oracle Open World 11, a copy of which can be found here. This presentation discusses how MySQL’s storage engines have recently made dramatic progress in large database manageability.

A list of other MySQL talks can be found in a handy list that Ronald Bradford put together here. For those who want to learn more about TokuDB^®, we have an upcoming webinar here.

Challenges of Big Databases with MySQL

Many database management tasks become difficult as you move from millions of rows and gigabytes of data to billions of rows and terabytes of data. Such tasks include ingesting data while maintaining indexes; changing schemas without downtime; and supporting connections, replication, and backup. For some scaling problems (connections and replication), MySQL is better than most of the competition. For others, such as indexing, schema changes, and backup, MySQL has typically been harder to use. Fortunately, the tasks MySQL does well are in its core, whereas the tasks that are more difficult can be solved with storage engine plug-ins.

This presentation discusses how MySQL’s storage engines have recently made dramatic progress in large database manageability. I’ll be speaking Sunday (10/2) 2:45 pm at Moscone West, 2018. Details can be found here. A complete list of MySQL talks can be found in a handy list that Sheeri put together here.

You can communicate with the MySQL council in several ways including:

• Respond to the MySQL Council Survey.
• Talk to one of the council members. I’ll be in Orlando on Sunday and Monday, and in Santa Clara on Tuesday through Friday. Giuiseppe say’s he’ll be in California then in Florida. Other council members include Sarah Novotny, Sheeri Cabral, Rob Wultsch, and Matt Yonkovit. Any of us would be glad to hear your questions, concerns, or ideas about how to make the MySQL Council more effective or more representative of the community.
• Submit your questions for the keynote.

Hope to see many of you this week.

The Stata Center was designed by Frank Gehry and was completed in 2005. The Stata Center houses CSAIL (The MIT Computer Science and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory) and LIDS (The MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems). Some of my favorite pictures of the Stata Center were taken during construction. (I’m a member of CSAIL)

The OpenSQL Camp will be held on the first floor of the Stata Center where we’ve reserved four classrooms (with capacities 318, 90, 60, and 60 respectively). We expect to have access also to the social areas along the interior “student street”.

The OpenSQL Camp has been running since 2008 in an “unconference format” with a blend of spontaneity and planning, no registration fees, and is open for all essentially on a first-to-sign-up basis (the sign up sheet isn’t up yet, however). The unconference typically includes seminars, hackathons, freeform discussions, and socializing with discussion topics including MySQL, PostgresQL, NoSQL, Maria, Drizzle, Storage Engines, the implications of new hardware and data structures technologies, and “soft” topics such as the formation of the Open Database Alliance, as well as anything else people want to talk about.

Mid October is near the peak of the fall foliage season. We are trying to get the conference organized early so that people will be able to find reasonable accomodation and travel arrangements.

It looks like Sheeri and I will be doing a lot of the legwork to organize this event, but this event can succeed only if many people pitch in to make it work.

I hope to see you there!

You can find this talk and other mostly technical material at http://tokutek.com/technology/.

You can find this talk and other mostly technical material here.

This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

This is a whiteboard presentation and is less well developed than the talk I gave a the MySQL conference (I posted those slides two days ago. But since it includes audio it may be easier to understand.

This talk presents the data structure underlying the TokuDB storage engine for MySQL.

You can find this talk and other mostly technical material at http://tokutek.com/technology/.