[Phpmyadmin-devel] Report from Percona Live MySQL 2012 & Thanks to Yosun Chang

[Robin H. Johnson]

Hi all,

This is my report back from the Percona MySQL conference.

This is my 5th year representing PMA at the MySQL conference:
I've been there 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2006 (Marc did it solo in
2007/2008 as I couldn't afford it or had conflicts).
I realize that I've also been involved with phpMyAdmin for more than 11
years now. My first patch went in 2001/04/29 and I was on the mailing
lists prior to the SourceForge move.

I'd like to extend a special thank you to Yosun Chang. (BCC'd).
She saw our booth last year: 
http://yfrog.com/h0avrihj
Blogged about designer mode: 
http://yosun.me/2011/04/13/enabling-phpmyadmin-designer-mode-for-ajax-view-of-table-relations/
And then this year she came back and loaned us a monitor to help show
off features, and lend a hand on the first night:
https://twitter.com/#!/Yosun/status/189863107638726657/photo/1
She's also all-around awesome and has a little startup:
http://www.kubikulo.com/

General:
- The GIS functionality was a hit, along with the always popular DB
  designer and charts.
- As per previous years, there are two types of people that came to the
  booth:
  - Those to give us kudos as they already use PMA
  - those that were lurking the conference, and often haven't used MySQL
	at all before, if they were even a tech type.

Specific list of bugs & feature requests:
- DB Designer and other tools that require the PMAdb to be created need
  to be easier to get going. Maybe include the ability to specify your
  MySQL root credentials and use them to create a database, import the
  schema, create the PMA user?
- It needs to be possible to put PMAdb on a different server. For if
  you're connecting PMA to a readonly replication slave, and you cannot
  save your bookmarks or query history.
- Charts functionality is popular, but painful to use sometimes:
  An example from the GIS sample data I was using:
  Creating a chart of the population of regions of Mexico:
  You have to create a view with name/population first, and chart that.
  It was simply not doable with the base table.
- User auth is still a holdback. There is demand for a transformation
  function:
  auth(user, password[, server[, token]]) does validation, and on success,
  returns (mysqluser, mysqlpassword), which is used to connect to MySQL.
  The transformation function should have some common variants, but also
  be able to plug in something else custom (eg LDAP).
- Some users complained that the versions of PMA deployed by cpanel and
  Rackspace are out-of-date and/or crippled. User management esp was
  noted as crippled.
- Engine support: Tokutek asked about what was needed to get their
  engine listed in the create table dropdown.
- Replication status: can we include the stats from the Maatkit/Percona
  Toolkit heartbeat app, and/or possible other tools?
- The DB Designer had some feature requests too: 
	- Some rough attempt at an initial layout solution
	- Auto-save layout changes
	- Create table opening in a new tab
- PR material needed: We've got the artwork material we used for the
  banner in 2005, and the team shirts made at the same time, but not
  much other selection of open-format vector artwork for usage in
  conference programs and other promotional material. I've seen jpegs of
  newer logo materials, but very little by way of vector source artwork.

Negatives:
- Our banner, originally printed for the first ever team meeting back at
  LinuxTag 2005 in Karlsruhe, got lost at the end of this trip :-(.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Developer, Trustee & Infrastructure Lead
E-Mail     : robbat2 at gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : 11ACBA4F 4778E3F6 E4EDF38E B27B944E 34884E85