At the March Boston MySQL User Group meeting, Jacob Nikom of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory presented "Optimizing Concurrent Storage and Retrieval Operations for Real-Time Surveillance Applications." In the middle of the talk, Jacob said he sometimes calls what he did in this application as "real-time data warehousing", which was so accurate I decided to give that title to this blog post.

The slides can be downloaded in PDF format (1.3 Mb) at http://www.technocation.org/files/doc/Concurrent_database_performance_02.pdf. The 54 minute video can be downloaded (644Mb) at http://technocation.org/node/693/download or streamed directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/693/play.

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At the January 2009 Boston User Group I presented a session on the new partitioning feature in MySQL 5.1. I go through how to define partitions, how partitioning makes queries faster, the different types of partitioning and when to use each type, and the restrictions and limitations of partitioning.

The sildes are available at http://www.technocation.org/files/doc/2009_01_Partitioning.pdf. The 380.6 Mb .mov movie (1 hr 16 min) can be played directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/671/play or downloaded at http://technocation.org/node/671/download.

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What's new, in a nutshell: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-nutshell.html.

Release notes: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/news-5-1-x.html (In the video, it's the page entitled "Changes in release 5.1.x").

And yes, very early on (at about 2 minutes in) I talk about my take on Monty's controversial post at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2008/11/oops-we-did-it-again-mysql-51-released.html

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I have written a new book on SQL DML. This is a total beginner book: how to commit and rollback, how to query, how to add data, etc.

Probably not of interest to most of the people who read this blog but if you know of anyone completely new to SQL, this would make a great Christmas present. Only 14.95. It is completely vendor agnostic, although the examples all use Oracle and MySQL.

You can view the Table Of Contents, Preface and Index here. I plan to release some of the chapters for free on the blog and will make the PDF of the book available at a discount. I have several more books like this (DDL, Intro to Relational Databases and Cloud Computing) under construction. I also plan to do some …

At LISA 2008, I gave a presentation entitled "How to Stop Hating MySQL: Fixing Common Mistakes and Myths".

The presentation slides can be downloaded as a PDF at:

http://technocation.org/files/doc/stophatingmysql.pdf

View the video online at http://technocation.org/node/646/play or download the 202.5 MB Flash video file (.flv) directly at http://technocation.org/node/646/download.

Here are some notes and links I referred to:

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Today at the Venture Capital Forum in Hilton Arc de Triomphe, Paris, I received the EVCA “Hall of Fame” Award on behalf of MySQL AB. What a timing, to meet with investment bankers and venture capitalists now!

In these times of a deep finance crisis, of no credit handed out by banks and of general doom and gloom, it felt great to be somewhat of an “everybody’s darling”. In the VC community, MySQL is seen as a great success — and in particular, we’re seen by European VCs as a European success story (despite over 50 % of our personnel and most of our Management Team being US-based, at the point of time when the VCs exited).

Side note: I don’t mind MySQL being seen as a European success story. We’re used to portraying ourselves as belonging to whatever geography is relevant for the moment. That …

Well, nobody from Sun showed up in person, but we got a great rendition of "Where were you when you heard THE NEWS that Sun bought MySQL?" from Mark Rubin, the MySQL Sales Engineer for the New England area, and from Giuseppe Maxia, who revealed something very interesting and riveting.

From there, Giuseppe gave a short talk on what it's like to work at MySQL, and then we moved on to the topic of the user group meeting, "What is MySQL Cluster Good For?"

The slides for the talk are downloadable in PDF Format 61kB and Flash (SWF) format, 31kB

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The Boston MySQL User Group was lucky enough to get Keith Murphy to speak at the June User Group meeting, about backups.

Links referred to in the presentation:

MyLVMBackup by Lenz Grimmer
http://lenz.homelinux.org/mylvmbackup/

InnoDB Hot Backup:
Prices are at:
http://www.innodb.com/hot-backup/order/
and at the time of this writing are:
1-Year License ? 390 USD$ 605 per server
Perpetual License ? 990 USD$ 1540 per server

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At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, Jeff Rothschild of Facebook.com delivered a keynote entitled "A Match Made in Heaven? The Social Graph and the Database". See people's blog posts on the Forge at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008ThursdayNotes#A_Match_Made_in_Heaven.3F_The_Social_Graph_and_the_Database

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Ann Harrison and Kevin Lewis spoke about "Falcon for Innodb Users". Download the slides, see people's notes, and more on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008WednesdayNotes#Falcon_for_InnoDB_Users