I’ve finished my last of three sessions, finally getting through my hierarchies session. With the laptop failure, speaking just was not as enjoyable this year as in previous years when there were no such concerns to distract me from giving the audience a good session.

The Hierarchies session seemed well received, with the room packed and audience members up against the back wall. I do wish I had not been opposite the Second Life session, as I was quite interested in how they scale.

Materials

Managing Hierarchies

Sakila Sample Database - …

As I mentioned previously, I’ll be reporting on the conference swag along with the sessions at this year’s MySQL User Conference.

The first candidate? The SCO Giant Pen

Check it out!

I love our IT guys. One call to the Cupertino office and one of the IT guys drove to the conference center with the discs needed to reinstall Windows and Office.

I’m now getting everything patched and ready to deliver my session on Managing Hierarchical Data. Sadly there is no recording of the Sakila session because I had to deliver it on a conference-provided PC.

Lessons learned:

Do not sit near high voltage lines and work on your laptop. The only explanation I have for the issues is that I sat near a thick power cable for the lights during the keynote, perhaps it was not well shielded and corrupted files.

Keep your slides in at least three places. When I left I copied my slides from my desktop to my laptop and also to a keychain drive. When my laptop failed I was annoyed but did not panic because I was able to simply insert my keychain into the dekstop provided in the session room and deliver my …

Just a warning to everyone that I will not be posting many blog entries from the UC today, my laptop is suffering from an unknown issue that I need to diagnose and repair before I can do any work from it.

On the bright side there is a great blogger contingent here this year and there is plenty of content to go around.

Session attendees: I will get content online as soon as I can.

Session by Laura Thomson, OmniTI. Laura is author of a number of popular PHP and MySQL books.

Session will be on security at the developer level and is written from a programmer’s perspective.

Many developers plug along without any knowledge that they have security problems, security awareness is a relatively new thing. This session is not about guru-level knowledge, it is about developer-level practices.

MySQL Security Basics

• Do not run your mysqld as the unix root user. Run it as a purpose-created user.Do not use the purpose-created user for anything else. MySQL root user is not related to the Unix root user.
• Set permissions on DB data files directory so that only mysqld user can access them.
• Disable symlinks to tables with –skip-symbolic-links unless you need them.
• Disable access to port 3306 except to trusted hosts.

…

For those who can’t wait for next week or who won’t be at the UC, I’m posting a flash recording of a rough practice run of my Sakila DB session that I will deliver next week. I wanted to get a feel for duration without audience questions or closing activities. I came in at 30 minutes so I am comfortable that with audience questions it should be good.

Feedback is of course appreciated.

See it at http://www.openwin.org/mike/video/sakila.html

So, here’s the rough plan of what I will attend next week:

Monday AM:

Secure Your PHP and MySQL Web Applications, Laura Thomson

Monday PM:

Data Warehousing with MySQL, John Paul Ashenfelter

Tuesday AM:

Welcome!, Arjen Lentz

State of the Dolphin, Kaj Arnö, David Axmark, Michael (Monty) Widenius

Introduction to Database Normalization and Joins, Mike Hillyer, Arjen …

I leave for the MySQL User Conference this Saturday. In the meantime, I’m working on final preparation. This involves things like tweaking my slides, configuring my laptop, packing, getting a haircut, and all the little things you need to do before attending a conference for a week.

Tweaking my Slides - Going over my slides, doing test deliveries to check time and content. Once I have them how I want them I push them online so attendees can follow along. Tweaking happens even this late into things because I can be a bit of a perfectionist with the slides (most slides even have a good number of notes).

Configuring my Laptop - Because I work from the desktop when at home, I take some time to make sure the laptop has all updates and a good defrag before I head out. I also ensure that my slides are on the laptop and that its desktop is clean so attendees don’t see too much clutter. Since the laptop serves as my wife’s email …

Just in case the HypnoToad did not convince you to attend my sessions at next weeks’s conference, I’ll up the ante.

Thanks to Apress and O’Reilly I’ll be giving away several MySQL related books at each session.

There, now you have to come. And of course watch this space for session notes.

Well, after consulting with licensing guru Zak Greant and talking to one of the official powers that be at MySQL, I now have a name and a license for the new sample database.

The name? Sakila. Yup, no issues with using the name I have been using so far, which is a good thing.

The license? The new BSD license. This should make it as easy as possible for authors to use it in their books and articles without any licensing concerns at all.

I’m trying to clean up a bug I found and flesh out the docs a bit more, I hope to post what could be considered a release candidate tomorrow.

And remember, come to the session on Sakila at the MySQL UC.