In this episode, Fred & Scott share their history with MySQL - including when they first started using MySQL and discuss some of their favorite features.

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Episode Transcript:

00;00;08;15 - 00;00;30;23
Welcome to Inside MySQL Sakila speaks -  a podcast dedicated to all things MySQL. We bring you the latest news from the MySQL team, MySQL product updates and insightful interviews with members of the MySQL community. Sit back and enjoy as your hosts bring you the latest updates on your favorite open-source database. Let's get started.
 
00;00;30;29 - 00;00;56;13
Welcome to Inside MySQL: Sakila Speaks, I am leFred and I'm Scott Stroz. Hi, Scott. So today we start the season two first episode. Am I right? Indeed. And unlike previous episodes, it's just you and me. We don't have a guest. We're going to talk about our experiences using MySQL That's awesome. So, Scott, tell me, how do you came to MySQL and when was it?
 
00;00;56;20 - 00;01;30;28
I know it was in either late 2001 or early 2002. I had just started a job as a web developer for the company I worked for as a paramedic, previously. So, I switched careers, but I was fortunate enough to stay at the same company and I had no budget. I was I literally had to create. I literally had to build a server out of spare parts in the back room, and I used a LAMP configuration.
 
00;01;30;28 - 00;01;56;07
So, Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, and if I remember correctly, the first version was 3.23 I think was the first version that I used, and I've been using it ever since. I've done most of the work I've done with MySQL has been on personal projects, so any time I've had a little personal project I've done, I've used that.
 
00;01;56;07 - 00;02;26;14
And there's been a couple of projects, you know, from jobs that I've done, you know, pretty big jobs for like big government agencies that have used it as well. How about you? For me, I was expecting you had started before me, so I would have looked younger, but so I started. But with MySQL the first time I really discovered MySQL without really knowing what it for.
 
00;02;26;17 - 00;02;57;00
I was already 1997 because I was a fan of Linux and still I am right there. I may be one of the only guys who, before 2000 went to a Linux desktop. Even so, a Linux desktop year was for me a long time ago. And so I remember it's a fun story because I went to a computer shop to buy some games.
 
00;02;57;03 - 00;03;23;17
I wanted to buy a game, in fact, and the game was just the small floppy disk and it costs and at that time I think it was around what we call thousand Belgium franc before Euro. So, and, and there was this box of five or six CDs called InfoMagic CDs where it was Linux on it. Right.
 
00;03;23;19 - 00;04;05;07
And and this is I say with the same money I would have more with than a floppy, I will have a full CDs there. And so this is how I started to install the first time Linux on my machine. And it was a bit before 1997, the first InfoMagic. I think it was around 1994 or five, but it was without MySQL at that tie and every year I was buying the new InfoMagic set and there was MySQL 3.20 in beta – in slackware -  at the time and this is so I install it the first time and then I started to try to have a look at it.
 
00;04;05;09 - 00;04;33;03
and as I was doing computing at a computer science job and it was a time of CGI in Perl, I remember I started with something called Sprite and that allows you to write and to SQL on flat the text file. So we were using that to record the, the IP of people visiting to read, counters not to not incremental the day.
 
00;04;33;06 - 00;05;07;18
And then I switched to MySQL to do that, to have something even better than a flat file. But this was just during the study I would sit and after death, professionally, I met MySQL already around between 2002 to 2004, I guess, and the company I was working in Belgium, we started to work with MySQL AB at the time and I passed the training in 2005.
 
00;05;07;18 - 00;05;38;01
It was still in MySQL 4.1 exams at the time and we had the core and professional exam and this is how I really jumped in MySQL as a daily work, I would say taking the exam and then doing consulting in Belgium for MySQL. And after that I also worked with the make company, the one I was working for with MySQL AB to provide also training so for MySQL.
 
00;05;38;01 - 00;05;59;25
So the the usual training of MySQL AB or as some companies in Belgium were basically to be was not able to deliver because there were too many people they wanted in some time in French and Italian at the same time. So it was a bit and this is how I really started to learn and study MySQL. So I really enjoyed that.
 
00;05;59;27 - 00;06;36;21
But I never end up there. It was this fast, always move forward both. As you know, we also do a conference. You do? We do conferences. I do talks and I really jumped into MySQL community. Meaning then let's hear meeting all these stars of MySQL and stuff in 2010 when I gave my first talk at FOSDEM.
 
00;06;36;23 - 00;07;02;01
So this was about maintaining too big tables in MySQL. And because I was maintaining big budget business in companies in Belgium, all in MySQL, MySQL was everywhere. So that was very good. And so I go there and this is where I met a lot of people and the community manager at the time in MySQL and plenty of other people.
 
00;07;02;07 - 00;07;47;04
And this is all I really started jumping in the community of MySQL. For the longest time. I was kind of like a lurker in the community. I didn't really post a lot of questions or answer a lot of questions on the forums, but I spent a lot of time there learning stuff. So, I, like I said, I've been using MySQL for over 20 years now and one of the things I use it for and I've talked about this before in presentations that I've done and I may have even mentioned it on the past episodes, but I manage a golf league, and the golf League grew to the point where we couldn't really like we
 
00;07;47;04 - 00;08;07;26
used to track everything in an Excel spreadsheet and we couldn't do that anymore because we actually had - we we've grown to 80 golfers. There's 80 golfers in the league. We have 40 that play in one night, 40 that play in another night. And I wrote a web application to help me manage the golf league. I can do scheduling.
 
00;08;07;28 - 00;08;29;13
There are guys who are responsible for entering the scores, so it tracks people's scores a calculates their handicaps. It figures out who is in the lead. Okay. And one of the things that used to drive me crazy was I have a stats page where you can look up your stats, you can look up you know, what you've shot in previous rounds.
 
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Which holes do you shoot the better, better on as compared to others. And then it it counts the number of birdies, pars, whatever that you have it gives you a percentage. But it also compares it to everybody else in the league. So, you know, you can say, hey, I birdied 10% of the holes, but the league's birdied 15%.
 
00;08;50;01 - 00;09;12;15
And some of those queries used to take a long time and I it wasn't like a ridiculously long wasn't like people were waiting for like minutes for the stats to come up, but it was longer than I thought it should have. And I realized that the solution to that problem was going to be setting up a query that uses common table expressions.
 
00;09;12;17 - 00;09;42;16
But unfortunately at the time MySQL did not support it and that when I forget what version it was that that CTEs were introduced. But I switched over like immediately, like I got my development environment, I created the queries the way I wanted them. They were actually orders of magnitude faster than what they were. And I was like, Wow, this is like the greatest thing since pockets like that were.
 
00;09;42;16 - 00;10;07;23
To me, that was like a huge, like change in, in my development attitude of, you know, we have, you know, basically, you know, common table expressions, are kind of pre aggregating data a little bit. And I was like, wow. I, I had them in just one particular place. And I've actually changed a bunch of queries since then to use them because I'm like, wait, I can speed this query up.
 
00;10;07;25 - 00;10;38;17
And again, it's not the website doesn't get so much traffic where people are going to notice these things. But I noticed that I like I'm like, no this could be faster. And I think for me, for this particular project, adding CTEs was probably the best feature we've added because for me in this particular instance, it added a lot of value to helping speed up queries that were otherwise not very efficient.
 
00;10;38;19 - 00;11;13;27
Is there something like that for you? So this was MySQL 8. It's what was very what we always say, a big giant leap for a SQL in the most critical system. Right? So MySQL at all this knew I would say new for MySQL features like a windows expression, common table expressions and so on. So just to so on the team, you are the developer guy, so the guy will use MySQL as a developer and the guy more in the sysadmin, DBA path.
 
00;11;14;02 - 00;11;49;19
So for me, yeah, it's cool to have CTE and Windows function but this is not what for me was a shining for me was an issue on the other side or lower side. Something that for me was like, this is so great. It's for example, the clone plug in, clone plug in. It's amazing when you have to deploy databases because I had