jcole’s weblog

It was a tough decision, but after much deliberation, the Proven Scaling Free Ride panel has made their decision, and the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007 Free Ride winners have been chosen. To recap, each of the winners will receive:

• Round-trip airfare from their location to SJC, SFO, or OAK airport
• Transportation from the airport to hotel/conference
• Hotel accommodations
• A meal stipend
• A full conference pass, provided by MySQL AB (Thanks, MySQL!)

Without further ado, here are the winners and their stories:

Jan Lehnardt, a student from Münster, Germany

Asked why we should choose him, Jan says: “I’m not a one trick pony. I’m a computer science student, but I attend classes in English literature and linguistics. I’m a freelancing open-source consultant by night, so I can pay for my studies. I like to improve user-interfaces by making them more humane. I want to make the web accessible and good looking to not only the 14 to 40 generation.”

J.R. Bullington, from a non-profit in Sterling Heights, Michigan, USA

J.R. had this to say about the opportunity: “I know that this section isn’t long, but it really does come down to money. I can get the time off and I have the support of my superiors. However, as we do not gain a profit and only gain enough capital to keep the lights on and the water running, training and conferences are not in the budget unless I pay for them myself.”

Carlos Proal Aguilar, from a non-profit in Puebla, Mexico

Carlos is concerned about the community in Latin America, and wonders why there is so little action on an international scale coming from the area. Carlos also says: “I have been a big MySQL fan for several years and have contributed with the mailing list and some bugs/patches and right now i have a couple of tutorials that I want to share with the community (after translating from Spanish to English).”

Thanks for all the entries, and I look forward to meeting Jan, Sean, and Carlos at the conference in just about three weeks.

Update: Sean Walberg couldn’t make it to the conference due to some scheduling conflicts, so we have chosen J.R. Bullington to replace him.

In just about 12 hours, we will close Proven Scaling‘s Free Ride to MySQL Conference and Expo 2007 form to new entries, and start deliberating on the winners. Get your entry in now if you want a chance to go to the MySQL event of the year for free!

So far we have received 16 entries for the Proven Scaling Free Ride to MySQL Conference and Expo 2007, which will be in Santa Clara, California, April 23-26. (A recap: We are providing free airfare, hotel, meals, and a full conference pass to three people who impress us with their submissions.) A few of the submissions so far have had the panel laughing hysterically (and we DO appreciate a bit of humour in our judging). A few of you have not tried at all. I thought I’d provide some tips on what helps and what hurts as you submit your entries:

• Helps: Showing that you have a sense of humour, and can tell a good story.
• Hurts: Leaving all of the entry blanks empty.
• Helps: Showing some humility, and that you will appreciate the free ride.
• Hurts: Not knowing what the conference is about.
• Helps: Telling us a little about how you intend to spend your time at the conference if you are chosen.

Submit your entry today! The deadline is this Friday, March 23^rd at midnight PDT (GMT-7)!

Proven Scaling will sponsor three people to attend the MySQL Conference and Expo 2007 in Santa Clara, California, April 23-26!

That’s right, we will pay for your airfare and hotel, transport from the airport, and even a stipend for meals! MySQL AB has graciously provided us with conference passes for the Free Ride winners, so the winners will each receive a full conference pass.

Go to Proven Scaling Free Ride to enter. The deadline is midnight PDT (GMT-7), Friday March 23^rd (just over a week away), so do it soon!

I look forward to reading your entries — and I hope to see you there!

Back around November 2005, I started working on query profiling in MySQL via the SHOW PROFILE and SHOW PROFILES commands. It’s been an interesting ride, but profiling support is finally available in public releases of MySQL starting with MySQL Community 5.0.37!

I had a few thoughts on the process and the feature that I’d like to share:

It’s been rough — Although everyone at MySQL who had seen the patch had wildly positive feedback about it, it took almost a year and a half to get things committed. Chad Miller took up my cause (back in December?) with the profiling patch as well as many others, and things actually started making progress. Thanks Chad!

Things were changed — In order to accept the feature, MySQL wanted a few things changed, which Chad handled. An interface using INFORMATION_SCHEMA was added, which I don’t entirely agree with, and the times and statistics returned were changed to absolute instead of cumulative. More on this below.

Absolute times are misleading — With SHOW PROFILE you will see rows like this:

| query end            | 0.00028300 |

Does that mean it took 0.283ms to end the query? Not necessarily. The only way SHOW PROFILE knows when to cut off the timer is when the status next changes. Since the status messages were only meant to be informational, and in fact many of them were never meant to be seen in the first place, the status is not always changed in logical places in order to collect accurate timestamps this way.

My original patch only used cumulative numbers—they don’t imply any given amount of time spent in a particular place, just the total time or statistics collected at the moment the status was changed. I may submit a patch to once again reveal this information with e.g. SHOW CUMULATIVE PROFILE, as it seems very unlikely that the powers that be will allow it to be changed now.

Status messages need some updating — The last phase of the profiling patch that has yet to be done is to go through all of the status messages, cleaning them up where appropriate, and adding new messages to display more useful profiles. Perhaps I will have time to work on this soon.

Let me know how you like profiling and if you manage to make use of it!

Exciting news! Adrienne is resting and I hold in my arms (typing this with one hand): Liam Alexander Cole, born on Friday, March 2^nd at 15:31 PST (GMT-0800). He weighs 7 lbs 11.5 oz (3501 g) and is 18.75 inches (47.6 cm) long/tall.

Sorry for miscategorizing this in the “MySQL” category — I wanted everyone to see it even if they just follow me through Planet MySQL!