I want to show my personal appreciation for Boston by sponsoring the MySQL User Group for one year. I am doing that with my own money, without involving my company.
You can also donate for a MySQL user group, if you want, using the Technocation fund.
You …

In the wake of Meetup.com changing their sponsorship agreements, Technocation, Inc., an international not-for-profit group, has set up a fund for user group sponsorships. You can use the button below to donate any amount of money in US funds via PayPal:

(all monies sent through that button will be earmarked as a directed donation to the “User Group Fund”. In the interest of not cluttering up this blog post with a Donate button for each currency, you can use PayPal to send funds in *any* currency to “donate@technocation.org”. Just be sure to specify if you want the money to go to specifically to the User Group Fund.*)

Note that meetup.com’s fees are $144 per year ($12 per month).

Four years ago, MySQL and Meetup.com entered into an agreement. I have no idea of the details of this sponsorship, though from reading in between the lines, I believe the sponsorship was an in-kind sponsorship — that is, …

This is about the ending of the sponsorship of the mysql.meetup.com user groups by Sun/MySQL and their suggested move to Facebook.

If people want to move to Facebook, that’s fine. For those who want to stay but don’t have the local funding, I have an offer for you. Contact Open Query, and we’ll sponsor your group for the coming months. This is not open-ended, I think a more permanent solution is important (moving, sponsorship, whatever) but I want to make the effort for the community to prevent any groups from disappearing now just because of this.

I was the one who originally set up the agreement with meetup.com when they first started charging for meetups (and it turned out to be a very good business model for them!). When that change was announced, quite a few meetup organisers were going to quit. The …

While preparing the slides, I realized that, for the first time, we have a product that allows a painless performance gain. Unlike all the tuning and technological improvements that you can use to improve …

We’ve had MySQL meetup’s organised thanks to mysql.meetup.com for years now, and its sad to see the relationship end in about a fortnight. Never fret, because it seems that Facebook can do all that, and more.

Migration

If you’re the meetup organiser, and you checked the Members list, or even attempted to download it, you’ll be disappointed. You get a CSV file, with the name of the person, some other metadata, if they’re on the mailing list (chances is yes to all), and the URL of the member profile. What’s missing? An email address.

So while its nice to have a CSV copy of the member list, it will not assist you in any migration, whatsoever. Totally data lock in :-(

Mailing list/message board

Keep in mind that you’ve got mailing lists and message boards on meetup.com. You’ll want to make use of this, to tell people to join your new Facebook group. Mailing lists are of the form: …

The bad news is that whatever agreement MySQL AB had with Meetup.com has ended. As per the wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/How_to_create_a_user_group:

MySQL AB has an agreement in place with meetup.com to cover the organizer fees. Simply click at the link at the top of the meetup.com page to request your electronic voucher so you can become an organizer.

Unfortunately, this agreement has ended, so there’s going to have to be a more manual process to get MySQL to sponsor the meetup groups. At its cheapest, a year of meetup.com is $144.

The good news is that Giuseppe and Dups (as well as the local Sun/MySQL folks in Boston who also sponsor the pizza and soda we have) have expressed that they are dedicated to sponsoring these user groups, so nobody has to go around digging for spare change just yet.

Here’s the sad e-mail I …

I am passing this along — I am not sure if most folks reading this can make it, as it is last-minute and in the Boston area, but I figured I’d let people know that the New England Database Society exists. It’s free, sponsored by Sun (and has been for years, long before Sun bought MySQL), and is hosted by my college database professor, Mitch Cherniack. (To that end, I should probably make sure to promote the Boston User Group here more often! I keep forgetting…)

You can find information on how to be a part of the mailing list at http://www.cs.brown.edu/sites/neds/

The next New England Database Society will be held on Friday, March 27 and the speaker is Christian Jensen of Aalborg University.

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[N]ew [E]ngland [D]atabase …

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. …

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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