Well we got to the MySQL Conference in San Jose in one piece. We're at the Doubletree by the airport. The conference is here at the hotel, so it's pretty handy (although expensive: a coffee is $2.45 and a beer is $5; with no other place in walking distance, we're a captive market). It's a good hotel, and we have a nice big room complete with Net access. I remembered to bring that switch and me and Todd are all hooked up to the dub dub dub. Unfortunately, the desk only has one chair, so Toddler has to sit on the luggage rack I found in the closet. Adversity builds the spirit; he'll be in fighting trim in no time.

I attended the database replication talk this morning and learned lots of great stuff in that area. It was hosted by Jeremy Zawodny, the tech lead at Yahoo!. I'm going to set up replication at work to do hot spares, and get a dev server with live data. I'll probably also use it at my mom's store. It's a pretty interesting topic. It's apparently easy to set up, but also easy to break. I also didn't know that MySQL basically replicates queries. It doesn't send actual data across the wire, it sends the update/insert SQL queries to the slaves and then those servers run the statements. Cool stuff.

The free conference lunch line had at least 498 people in it by the time we got there, so after a lovely lunch in the cafe (beef with barley soup and a reuben sandwich; you're welcome, Toddler!) we went to the PHP and MySQL session. It was hosted by none other than Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of PHP and another big wig at Yahoo!. It didn't cover MySQL all that much, but it was a great session. A couple things he said really blew my mind. Like PHP having the shortest "Hello World" program of any programming language: you just put the text "Hello World" in a PHP file and the preprocessor will happily print "Hello World" when you run it. "Try that in Java or Perl or C and see what happens... Why shouldn't PHP just print it if you want it to? Why should it complain about something it doesn't understand?" said Rasmus. There was kind of a quiet moment while the people there (standing room only) digested that one. Then you could see the "I get it now..." feeling wash over the crowd.

He also went over some insane things you can do with PHP. Like opening an image file and then reading it into a Flash object and then spinning it around. Spinning logos in PHP. Weird. Then there was the PHP code he showed that allowed one to set up a complete web site (with hundreds/thousands of pages if you want) with only having one PHP script acting as a 404 error handler for Apache. You basically check what the path in the URL request is and then go open a page there. If none exists, you use the URL path info to make a DB query and then print the file at the requested location and serve it up. Then next person that comes along doesn't hit the 404 error handler (and doesn't execute the PHP program) -- they get the file the previous run created. I wanted to pipe up and ask how he manages preventing people from abusing his server but I didn't. (For the terminaly curious: You could write a 3 line perl program that would ask for any number -- millions if you wanted -- of randomly-named files from a dynamic web site bult on his code from the example. That PHP code would nearly always run, and therefore nearly always create useless dummy files. You'd run out of file descriptors or disk space eventually, and this would be an effective denial of service attack on the web site.) I didn't pipe up because I was sitting way in the back (standing up this time) and I figure he was only showing the code as an example of a possibility, not a complete solution. I'm sure anyone putting that code into action on a live server would have to figure out a way to limit the effects of such an attack.

In other news, the conference made the news. Yes, the dolphin thing is everywhere. No, I don't know why the mascot is a dolphin. Yes, I got a t-shirt and it has the dolphin on it. My first vendor shwag in nearly four years. w00t!

Well that's all for now. There's apparently some meet-and-greet dinner event. Todd and I are going to see if we can score form free food and booze. I'll drag my laptop dowstairs tomorrow and Saturday and make notes as I go. More updates later...