thursday23.com

The 7th annual MySQL Users Conference & Expo will be held from April 20th to April 23rd, 2009 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. As many of us know, this is the largest gathering of MySQL developers and users worldwide. The conference not only hosts the latest MySQL Open Source technologies, in-depth sessions and tutorials, and an exhibit hall showcasing the latest open source technologies, but brilliant speeches which are traditionally informative, enlightening while extremely entertaining. Keynote speakers, such as Brian Aker, Stewart Smith and Kaj Arnö will all be returing this year, but it seems that Mårten Mickos, who had made a presentation at every previous MySQL Conference & Expo since the first annual MySQL Users Conference and Expo in 2003, will be taking a break. After last years highlights such as Guy Kawasaki's and Dick Hardt's brilliant presentations, it's difficult to wait patiently for what this year may bring us.

In my opinion the "Building a Twitter Analysis Tool Using MySQL, PHP, and NetBeans" session will be a big deal for many. I expect the session on how to "Build Your Own MySQL Time Machine" to be quite popular and I also think that the "SQL is Dead" session could be such an enormous hit that we may look back on it years from now. I, for example, can't wait for what will emerge from the Ruby and MySQL sessions. I'm especially interested in what will be discussed during the "High Performance Ruby on Rails and MySQL" session, held by David Berube on Tuesday, April 21st. For me personally, Ruby is a very magical language which accomplishes wonderful and amazing things, quite often, in a such a short amount of time and in such an elegant yet simple manner that I often perceive these instances as supernatural acts which leave me feeling like a caveman staring at a wheel for the first time. That said, I also find Ruby to be a very capricious language. Ruby is not flexible and in many instances applications built with Ruby on Rails will only be useful within a specific environment. This environment is, of course, the Ruby on Rails framework itself ...and Ruby ...and RubyGems ...and Lighttpd ...and MySQL ...and the MySQL bindings for Ruby. I know, I know... On with it!

The relationship between MySQL and the actual language used in cooperation with MySQL plays a key role in the development process and the eventual result and performance of that development process. MySQL one of the fastest relational databases and the most popular one used today, but like every piece of software, it's not entirely perfect. One problem is the network-to-web app-to-database process which can cause an entire application to seem slow. Ruby on Rails accentuates this problem by generating too many queries and beyond this, ActiveRecord itself can be a problem. Replacing ActiveRecord in key situations often results in time consuming batch process which can sometimes actually make the replacement of ActiveRecord impractical. I am very interested in finding out what solutions David Berube has found for this problem in particular.