On Thursday, I will travel to Boston, MA, to attend the Northeast LinuxFest, which includes also an edition of the Open Database Camp. The events will be at one of my favorite places on earth: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a.k.a. the MIT. Every time I speak at an event there, I feel at home, and I look forward to be there once more.

The Open Database Camp is organized, as usual, with the formula of an un-conference, where the schedule is finalized on the spot.

There are a few ideas for sessions. I have proposed two of the topics I am most familiar with:

• …

Once again, Pythian is organizing an event that by now may be considered a tradition: the MySQL community dinner at Pedro’s! This dinner is open to all MySQL community members as many of you will be in town for the MySQL Conference that week.

Here are the details:

What: The MySQL community pay-your-own-way dinner
When: Tuesday April, 23 – Meet us at 6:30 pm in the lobby of the Hyatt Santa Clara, or at 7 pm at Pedro’s (You are welcome to show up later too!)
Where: Pedro’s Restaurant and Cantina – 3935 Freedom Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054
How: Comment on this blog post to add your name to the list of probable attendees

Pedro’s can handle large groups of people, but we would like to have an …

Take 50% Off COLLABORATE 13 Now Through Wednesday But you’ve got to act fast! If you’re not already one of the many joining the IOUG at COLLABORATE 13 – IOUG Forum, sign up today for your chance at attending for … Continue reading →

While many attendees are repeat offenders, if 2013 is your first MySQL conference and you are relatively new with MySQL (say < 2 years experience), it can be daunting to determine which of the 8 or more concurrent sessions you should attend during the conference.

Here are my top recommendations that give you a good grounding in the various conference topics and a wealth of experience from known MySQL authorities, on important topics.

1. A backup today saves you tomorrow by Ben Mildred at Pythian. Losing your data is a terrible experience. Learn what is needed to keep your data safe and you system highly available.
2. …

Wanting to give away the pass at all costs, Shlomi then published a new post, …

It happened last year at the previous Conference, and it's going to happen this year as well.

There will be a session of lightning talks during the conference, for the joy of both the audience and the speakers.

Lightning talks are fun and instructional micro events. Their official purpose is to give the audience a chance to learn something in a very limited amount of time. The real purpose is for the speaker to be as entertaining and memorable as possible within the allocated time.

The call for participation is open from now until February 10th. If you have something that you want to say in not more than 5 minutes, you can SUBMIT A PROPOSAL.

In addition to propose a compelling description that will …

Libdrizzle is getting better and better with every release, and to reflect this we have two announcements to make.

First of all, Libdrizzle 5.1.2 has been released.  This release has several major bug fixes and performance enhancements.  Changes are as follows:

• Non-blocking Windows connections are now more stable
• Improvements to Windows building
• Unix Socket connections are now more stable
• Memory allocation/freeing cleanups (for performance and ease of code)
• Network packet buffer now much more flexible
• Many performance improvements (the bundled drizzle_binlogs tool is now around 10x faster on my i7 laptop)
• Several other minor bug fixes

API chages:

• drizzle_query_str() has been removed, drizzle_query() with a 0 byte length parameter now does the same thing.

As always you can …

On Monday afternoon, Neal Armitage and I will be speaking at Percona Live in London. It will be a three hours tutorial about Tungsten replicator.

The contents of this tutorial are mostly new. We have released recently a new and easier way of installing different topologies, in the shape of cookbook scripts, which are distributed with the replicator tarball.

Using this cookbook, any user can simply install multiple topologies, from the simple master/slave to all-masters, fan-in, and star.

There are recipes for showing the replication cluster, switching roles between master and a chosen slave, taking over MySQL replication, installing direct slaves with parallel replication, testing each topology, and uninstalling all.

All the above will be demonstrated during the tutorial, with the addition of conflict prevention and more management …

One of the great things about the MassTLC unConference is the spontaneity of the ideas. In the morning I ran into an old colleague whose startup was looking at switching databases and struggling with the options. Hence, “Scalable Databases for Startups” seemed like a great topic, so I proposed it, and then was off and running full steam after lunch.

The session brought in a wide variety of firms. While there were several vendors there – Basho, Calpont, InterSystems, ParElastic, and …

If you're planning to attend UKOUG in Birmingham on Dec 3-5, here's your guide to know more about Oracle's MySQL.

There's a MySQL stream on Monday 5th and we've a great list of sessions, including:

• Rich Mason's keynote on how to Deploy, Scale and Save with Linux, Virtualization and MySQL
• Keith Hollman on stage to discuss how to Embrace Database Diversity
• Mark Swarbrick's lecture on Tips & Tricks for MySQL …