GRAPH Engine for MySQL, MariaDB and Drizzle

Everybody knows that dealing with hierarchies in a relational database is awkward, and depending on your needs it gets ugly, or downright impossible to do quickly in SQL (lots of queries needed, etc).

What if...

• you could do such operations with simple single queries?
• you could have not only simple trees but also complex ones (multiple parents) ?
• you could have complex graphs for friend-of-a-friend or other structures?

GRAPH engine does all that, without breaking a sweat. Externally it looks like a table and a storage engine, but internally it's a computational engine, in this case specialised for graph operations.

Relax! A Failure is NOT an Emergency.

Full Paper

Modern geeks have a life. The trick is to keep it! While many people regard the existence and occurrence of "emergency situations" as normal and inevitable, this talk will challenge this idea. We don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night or across a weekend by blipping mobiles. Really.

This presentation will describe what this is all about and why it's important. With this new baseline, interesting possibilities open up. The basis is "prevention is better than a cure" but of course there's more to it than that, as many will agree with that particular statement but then disagree with the naturally following assertion of "a failure is not an emergency", for seemingly perfectly sensible reasons. But does it make sense?

It will make the case that architecting to avoid emergencies actually makes sound business and commercial sense both for companies as well as their clients and service providers (that is, upstream and downstream).

Multi-Master MySQL, effective why and how

Implementing multi-master setups with MySQL is fairly trivial in basic terms, but for an effective environment much more is involved. There are some tools (such as MMM, Multi-Master MySQL Manager) that can help, but there's still a lot to think of and each deployment is different. So why would you wish to bother, given all these complications? This session will explore precisely that, as well as the tools and pitfalls.

Since each master has to execute the writes from the other anyway, so we're not doing it for write scaling. Sharding is a more effective way to handle that. Instead, multi-master MySQL can be used to ease failover, as well as enable maintenance tasks. It can deliver a system that, even with major upgrades or structural changes, does not require any down time. We all hate that "this website is undergoing maintenance", and it's bad for business. So let's avoid it.

Deadly Sins Using MySQL and PHP

So many things just seem like a good idea, or make perfect sense at the time… but they are so utterly bad in the long run—issues of bad design, bad queries, bad tuning. Both MySQL and PHP many features, and some are often abused for what Arjen calls "evil purposes". Perhaps you can think of some yourself? Other issues are that old relational database “rules” do not always apply in 2009. But people just dogmatically remember the rule not the reason.

This talk covers a wide range of “no-no’s.” We will (at high speed) discuss them, and look at better solutions using very short, simple, and specific cases as examples. You may wish to take notes! The title was to get your attention, but Arjen promises to keep it lighthearted.