Tomorrow, The Big Trek starts. Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana will spend the time from then on until the MySQL Conference and Expo starts travelling by rail and bus all the way from home in Montreal to California. Hence the name “Dups on Rails”. The purpose of the Big Trek is to talk about MySQL in Canadian and US universities. He’ll also arrange MySQL Meetups and go on customer visits, as people ping him.

Towards the end of the trip, as we get closer to the User Conference, Dups won’t be alone. His alter ego Colin Charles (yes, people do mix up Dups and Colin) will join him from 13 April onwards in Northern California. And at the same time, a parallel trek is started by Giuseppe Maxia an Sheeri K. Cabral, in Southern California.

The list of universities include Queens University, University of Western Ontario, Illinois Institute of Technology, Purdue University, University of …

This Thursday (March 19th, 14:00 UTC), Susanne Ebrecht will give a MySQL University session on How to Use Charsets and Collations Properly. Susanne works at the MySQL Support team and is an expert in character set issues.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, and more.) All MySQL University sessions are recorded, that is, slides and voice can be viewed as a Flash movie (.flv). …

This Thursday (March 12th, 14:00 UTC), Martin MC Brown will give a MySQL University session on MySQL and ZFS. MC works on the MySQL Documentation Team and has been involved with quite a few Solaris things, for example porting MySQL to openSolaris. MC has recently given MySQL University talks on developing MySQL on Solaris and about using DTrace with MySQL.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't …

This Thursday (March 5th, 14:00 UTC), Konstantin Osipov will give a MySQL University session on Good Coding Style. Konstantin is the lead of the server runtime environment team, and has been around at MySQL since 2003.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, and more.) All MySQL University sessions are recorded, that is, slides and voice can be viewed as a Flash movie (.flv). You can find those …

As part of Sun's university relations, seven Sun engineers- Vadiraj, Varun, Blessen, Lawrence, Nirmal, Gautham and yours truly went to Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore during the past weekend for a multi-track technology talks on Java ME, GlassFish, MySQL, JavaFX, Open Solaris Virtualization technologies.

There were three parallel tracks:

• J2ME, GlassFish, MySQL- which form a nice combination of Client, Middleware and Database technologies and our (Vadiraj, Varun and Me) idea was to give hints here and there to the students how to bring all the three technolgies to develop applications and how each fits into the holistic idea. My MySQL slides are available here.
• JavaFX
…

As part of Sun's university relations, seven Sun engineers- Vadiraj, Varun, Blessen, Lawrence, Nirmal, Gautham and yours truly went to Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore during the past weekend for a multi-track technology talks on Java ME, GlassFish, MySQL, JavaFX, Open Solaris Virtualization technologies.

There were three parallel tracks:

• J2ME, GlassFish, MySQL- which form a nice combination of Client, Middleware and Database technologies and our (Vadiraj, Varun and Me) idea was to give hints here and there to the students how to bring all the three technolgies to develop applications and how each fits into the holistic idea. My MySQL slides are available here.
• JavaFX …

Today I gave my first MySQL University session as a speaker, talking about Backing up MySQL using file system snapshots. The talk went quite well (at least that was my impression) and we had ~10 people attending. The slides (PDF) and a recording of the session are now available from the Wiki page. Unfortunately the recording lacks the audio track, which is a bit of a bummer. We've submitted a support request with the DimDim folks, so hopefully they can provide us with a complete recording.

There was one question during the session that I was not able to answer myself, so I'm asking for your …