As the the Icelandic volcano ashes are clearing out and we finally have high hopes of flight home, I want to post the slides of the two presentations I did.

My first presentation was a double slot session about Oracle Clusterware internals. Presenting first thing in the morning on the first day is not easy at this event. Miracle Open World traditionally organized as 160% conference with 80% of technical content and 80% of networking and social interactions. Of course, the last 80% go deep into the night. Needless to say that 5am wake up call was tough — I had to craft few more slides to add some 11gR2 information and publish the first production of We Do Not Use TV Studio.

But I felt surprisingly well and fresh. The presentation itself was quite dynamic and all demos worked as planned except pausing OPROCD — 50/50 …

Here’s a sneak peek at a video matrix — this is all the videos that include Pythian Group employees at the MySQL conference. I hope to have all the rest of the videos processed and uploaded within 24 hours, with a matrix similar to the one below (but of course with many more sessions).

I’m looking forward to traveling to San Jose for this year’s MySQL Conference. If there’s anything that can trump the drama of conf two years ago, where we observed how Sun would handle its new property, and then the drama of last year, where we observed how Oracle would handle the pending acquisition, it’s going to be the drama around this one — the first MySQLConf since the Oracle/Sun merger has been finalized and approved.

I think there is some finality to the changing of the guard this time, since there aren’t really that many companies that could conceivably swallow up Oracle itself! (Maybe I shouldn’t say that — next thing you know they’ll spin it off heh.) But regardless, I am looking forward to getting to know Edward Screven and getting a sense from the keynote and other communications exactly what he’s planning to … DO … with …

Last month at the Boston MySQL User Group, I went through the meanings of INNER, LEFT/RIGHT OUTER, CROSS, NATURAL joins, how to do a FULL OUTER JOIN in MySQL, and what STRAIGHT_JOIN means. I also explained how to recognize when you want those types of joins, and best practices for the semantics of writing joins and design patterns. Subqueries were explained in this session, and some examples of how to think differently so that you end up writing JOINs instead of subqueries. The slides (slightly different from the slides in the video — due to error correction) can be found at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2010_01MySQLJoins.pdf.

Here’s the video:

In light of the official Oracle acquisition of Sun, I dug out a presentation video I realize I never officially shared with either the MySQL or the Oracle community. It’s the presentation I did at the 2008 Oracle Open World conference called, “So, you want to be an Oracle ACE?” and is a good resource for anyone who wants to contribute to anything — not just Oracle or MySQL, though certainly it’s based on my experiences with contributing to MySQL.

Oracle has lots of resources for the community. While I have joked about Oracle calling its conference “Open World”, I have also experience it, and the Oracle community first-hand and second-hand — through professional contacts such as my colleagues at Pythian who work on Oracle databases, and also through personal contacts such as my mother who has been to a few Oracle conferences herself.

…

On Monday, October 12, 2009* from 7-9 pm at MIT, I will be giving a presentation explaining SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS for the Boston MySQL User Group. There is information about foreign keys, transactions, deadlocks and mutexes just waiting to be discovered, and I will show how to decipher the information.

For all those in the Boston area, I hope to see you there! For those who cannot be there, we will video this presentation and make it available online, and post here when the video/slides are up.

*Yes, I realize that this is a bank holiday in the US.

Oracle Open World 2009 is just few weeks away and I firmed up my presentation schedule now. I will present three “normal” presentations and couple unconference sessions. I’m arriving in San Francisco few days before the conference (7th of October) get to the Oracle ACE Directors briefing so I’ll spend the first few day in Redwood Shores and then off to Moscone Center.

Before I get to the schedule, if you want to catch up with me during OOW — tweet me @alexgorbachev. You are likely to see me in the OTN Lounge or in “The Cave” if you know what I’m talking about.

Here is a quick summary of my presentations:

In record time, less than a week after the conference (thanks to the free Pinnacle Video Spin and YouTube), all 11 videos that were taken at OpenSQLCamp Europe are online.

For those who missed the sessions, or just want to relive the fun!

Almost all the sessions were filmed; regrettably Darren Cassar’s Securich – MySQL user administration and security made easy! and Stephane Combaudon’s Minimizing data access with covering indexes were not.

The YouTube videos have the descriptions and resources from the official conference pages, and links to pages. If there is more information to add (for example, the slides from a talk are now online), or if …

OpenSQLCamp 2009 is happening “in parallel to the Free and Open Source Conference 2009 (FrOSCon) on Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd August in St. Augustin, Germany …. close to Bonn and Cologne.”

I plan on being at FrOSCon and OpenSQLCamp. Where I go before and after that is up to *you*. Yes, that is right, perhaps I will visit a user group, such as France’s MySQL User Group. Or perhaps your company needs the type of services Pythian can offer — we can do the “traditional consulting” model where we look over your systems for performance tuning and security gains, or fix problems in an emergency. Even more of a win, we specialize in recurring engineering — we can supplement your existing IT staff with database expertise, and do all the database work your current …

I’m very proud to share with you a few things: Sheeri K. Cabral, Nick Westerlund, Paul Vallée, Peter Ling, and I (Augusto Bott) will be in Santa Clara, CA for the MySQL Conference and Expo, MySQL Camp, and the Percona Performance Conference, next week.

Nick and I will be presenting a session called Proactive Operational Measures on the Percona Conference, and another session called 8 Rules for Designing More Secure Applications at the MySQL Camp.

Sheeri will be presenting Understanding How MySQL …