The favourite Open Query course modules as well as reworked and brand new ones, with November/December 2009 dates for Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne listed below. You can register for days/modules individually, to suit your time, budget and current needs. Your trainers are Sean, Ray and Arjen (see OQ people).

For the Canberra and Melbourne days which are DBA/HA, registrations for all of the modules in a series before 15 October will receive a copy of the “High Performance MySQL” book (normal bookstore price is AUD 105).

Canberra

• Thu 5 Nov: MySQL High Availability – Strategy and Tools
• Fri 6 Nov: MySQL Cluster …

Today's the day I fly to Los Angeles to teach a private training class, en route to Santa Clara/San Francisco for our public training workshops next week.

Our Montreal practice teach at Station-C went great - it was an opportunity to do a road test and iron out any kinks in the delivery.

What did I learn in the process?

• Solid examples provide context.  I didn't have the best SHOW GLOBAL STATUS data for the practice teach, but I've edited my slides and our official classes will have much better information.
• Operational issues are one of the most important things people want to hear more information on.  A fair number of students know that dropping an index is not as painless as it should be, but not everyone knows about tools like Flipper and MMM.  It's not the main focus of our InnoDB/XtraDB workshop, but we will cover how to solve these …

I wanted to write a few administrative updates in one so I didn't spam everyone's feed readers too much. Here we go:

• We've had reports of some lost comments.  We reported this via Twitter a while ago, but thought it was fixed.  We'll try and pay more attention to spam filtering, but we wanted to reach out and say - let us know if you are one of the people having problems.  We're listening.  (Of course if you have any suggestions on how to manage/filter through thousands of spam items/week, we'd like to know as well).
• Pingbacks were recently dropped when we upgraded to Wordpress 2.8.  Miss them? …

Today, we are announcing that we're ready to offer training for InnoDB and XtraDB in Santa Clara and San Francisco.  The course was developed by Morgan Tocker with input from all our team - and covers a lot of the performance problems we run through in our consulting practice.

The Details:

14th Sept - Santa Clara
1 day intensive course
Cost: $300*

16th Sept - San Francisco
1 day intensive course
Cost: $300*

(* includes a copy of High Performance MySQL if you register before 31st Aug).

The delivery format:

Being only one day, we elected to deliver the course in a predominately lecture-format - but there will be a few opportunities to try examples.  For more information see the …

Yesterday, The Pythian Group issued a press release about my book, Pythian’s partnership with Sun, and our new “MySQL Adoption Accelerator Package”. I am not a marketing guru, but I can tell you what we the package means in terms of new work that the MySQL teams have been doing.

Basically, the MySQL Adoption Accelerator Package combines customized training with a comprehensive audit of systems. The name “Adoption Accelerator” makes it sound like it’s only for new applications that are almost ready to go live. What the program actually does is have us evaluate your systems, and intensively train you in the areas you want and need. The program is designed to suit all your needs, whether it’s teaching you about one topic (say, query optimization) or an entire range of topics, from Architecture to ZFS (special issues with running MySQL on ZFS, that is, but that did not fit a cute …

This alliance is an excellent step, showing the maturity, breadth and depth of expertise for MySQL related services! Of course Open Query is an active early member, with our training and subscription services, and initiatives like the OurDelta builds project.

Kudos to MontyW and PeterZ for driving this further while at the MySQL Conference last month.

By popular demand, we are now offering an on-line incarnation of our DRBD Total training sessions, normally taught in a 4-day on-site course. The next such training commences on May 18 (next Monday), and we still have a few seats left — so if you’re interested, grab one while you still can!

What’s covered in this course?

Here is an overview of the course highlights:

• Introduction to High Availability Clustering & DRBD
• Setting up a DRBD resource and common failure scenarios
• Configuring and running the Heartbeat/Pacemaker cluster stack
• Highly available NFS, MySQL, and virtualization
• DRBD performance tuning and optimization
• DRBD integration with Red Hat Cluster Suite
• Recent and future DRBD development

Every course attendee gets a virtual cluster to play with and practice on. It doesn’t get much more hands-on than this. …

From this Tuesday 12 May until Sunday 17 May I’m going to be in Darwin (Northern Territory, Australia), teaching custom MySQL training days for a medical research institute. DarLUG has been extinct for a while, but perhaps there are some local Linux/OSS people reading this? Please do drop me a line if you’d like to catch up while I’m there! I’ve only flown through Darwin before, never visited/stayed… and I love the tropics (I lived in Cairns for a while) so this shall be a joyous few days! Oh the tough things we have to do in business. I’m also doing a day trip to Litchfield… Kakadu will have to wait until another time (perhaps with Phoebe) as I’m told it’s best visited over multiple …

While I'm in Melbourne in a few weeks for training I'm once again visiting my friends at Linux Users of Victoria (LUV). It's been a while since my schedule coincided with their meeting schedule!

I've been invited to do one of the talks (Sandrine Balbo doing the other), and my topic is "Relax! A Failure is NOT an Emergency." which is although somewhat MySQL-related not actually MySQL-specific.

This will be on Tuesday April 7th. You can find more detailed description and location/time info in the LUV announcement.

Did you know that by banging your head against the wall you burn about 150 calories per hour? However, there are more effective and less painful ways to exercise (no surprise there). Personally, I like an early morning walk and playing some Wii games around lunch time.

Most companies aim towards high(er) value offerings, sold at a higher price, so that their margin increases. Right?
But what they're actually doing is desperately trying to outrun their own high (and escalating) cost structure. I ask you this: why should a client have to pay for inefficiencies in a provider's organisation? Also, why says that a higher value offering needs to a) be priced higher and b) have a higher profit margin?

This is not the unavoidable way of things, but the reason it's the usual is that you can't just decide to change one aspect (such as a higher value offering), yet keep the way the company is run the same, and then still …