My name is Zak Greant. I work for MySQL AB as their community advocate - I am also helping to organize the content for our upcoming MySQL User Conference (http://mysql.com/events/uc2004) that is happening in April.
Our deadline for choosing the final list of sessions is a couple of days away. We have so much excellent content that has been proposed that we need some help from the community in choosing the content that is best for the event.
Here are five general talks that we are still pondering. Please let me know which talks you would best like to see.
Notes:
* We will be posting addition information on the accepted sessions to http://mysql.com/events/uc2004/sessions.html within the next day.
* Even if you are not going, your feedback is valuable to you as we will work to post papers from most of the accepted sessions.
* We are also examining ways to let people who cannot attend still experience a few of the hands-on technical sessions via technology like VNC, live audio streams and/or IRC
* We are open to suggestions for other content in the form of BoF sessions and lightning talks (see http://www.mysql.com/events/uc2004/speakers.html)
The session titles are: * Best Practices for MySQL Administration in an Enterprise Environment * Large Volume Data Transformation and Warehousing using MySQL * MySQL as an Embedded Database: An Implementation Story * Web Development with Bells and Whistles using MySQL * Show Me the Money: Getting Your MySQL Certification
Best Practices for MySQL Administration in an Enterprise Environment
Best practices to effectively manage MySQL servers in the non-web space. Best practices are bunches of norms that generally make systems safer and cheaper. We will briefly review system configuration guidelines and what best practices means. The core presentation will review practices for space and perforamnce management, object management and UDFs, security, replication, backup, recovery and disaster recovery. The talk should be useful for both new and veteran MySQL DBAs, and will focus on MySQL 4.1.
Large Volume Data Transformation and Warehousing using MySQL
In this session we describe a set of transformations and their corresponding layers for loading data into a data warehouse. Standard SQL is used in all steps and queries are performed on whole sets of data. The features include historisation of data, placeholders for orphaned records, type checking, consistency control, duplicate count, model transformation and optimizations.
After extracting data from an operational system you are often left with relational, but not necessarily consistent data stored as text files with some kind of structure. However, for the purpose of doing analysis we need high data quality and performance, which is achieved through an efficient and consistent data model. The tables within it are our goal. In between the data is transformed and refined in several stages.
In the process the data passes through different layers of transformation, where each layer is represented with its own namespace using MySQL databases. To begin with there is a temporary layer containing tables that have a one to one correspondence with the files. These are character based to ensure that no data is lost when reading the files into the database. Internal consistency and duplicate analysis is done here according to an XML definition of the model.
The next layer is the raw layer, which is similar in model to the temporary layer with the exception of being persistent and having types. For data that should be historised only those records in the temporary layer that are new or constitute changes to data in raw are moved. Type, model and range errors are flagged here and another duplicate check is performed with respect to all data.
Within raw we should have a complete history of all data contained in the files with some extra metadata. The model is the same as the one implied by the data in the files. Having come this far could sometimes be enough, but since this model could be denormalized we take the process one step further and provide a mechanism for converting the data into a new model. This is also useful for substituting compound natural keys with simple surrogate ones and thereby increases performance. In order to do so a key lookup layer is introduced, containing the natural keys from the raw layer together with auto incremented surrogate keys. This layer is further used to produce surrogate keys from foreign keys in orphaned records, which ensures consistency.
The model in the key layer is the same as in our warehouse layer, which is loaded using a combination of data in the raw layer with the surrogate keys. The warehouse is in our case normalized according to 3NF, yielding efficient storage since data is not duplicated in the tables. However, when doing analysis we could utilize far better models when it comes to performance. An optional final mart layer takes the data from 3NF to a star, snowflake or flat model.
MySQL as an Embedded Database: An Implementation Story
Attendees will be taken through the decision process, implementation process review and outcome of using MySQL as an embedded database for one of Quest Software’s content management products.
Decision Process: 1. Reasons for evaluating MySQL 2. Benefits of using MySQL 3. Drawbacks of using MySQL 4. Other solutions evaluated 5. Outcome of decision and reasoning
Implementation:
1. Steps to implement
2. Migration
3. Implementation problems
4. Implementation WOWs (things that impressed us during the implementation process)
5. Use of consultants from MySQL
6. Creative solutions to some interesting problems during
implementation
Review: 1. Lessons learned 2. Things to do differently 3. Outcome – Project success 4. Other areas of possible use 5. Comparisons with other DBs evaluated 6. Customer/end user reaction and response
Attendees should take away reasons to evaluate MySQL as a solution, an understanding of the implementation process and a review of using MySQL for applications.
Web Development with Bells and Whistles using MySQL
Many web programmers already use MySQL. However, lots of these hard working programmers work to tight deadlines, are self-taught, and may never have experimented with some of MySQL's newer features. In particular, lots of programmers have not experimented with the special capabilities of MySQL's different table types. In this session we will look at how you can apply these features in the web development environment. We will discuss when and how to use the following features in the web environment:
- different storage engines
- transactions
- full text searching
- subqueries
The session will run in tutorial mode and will be aimed at programmers who are already using MySQL in a simple way and would like to learn more.
Show Me the Money: Getting Your MySQL Certification
MySQL certification gives developers a way to show employers and clients that they have top notch MySQL chops. This session provides an overview of what the certification is, what it means, how it is structured and how you can become certified.
Cheers! -- Zak Greant MySQL AB Community Advocate
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