We've been making a fair number of announcements recently - on both the product and the partnering front. That's generated a lot of interest, and a fair number of questions. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to deliver this overview and the upcoming focused discussions on what makes Sun tick in a video format. Let me know if this is useful, or what else we can do to keep you informed via the comment field at the bottom.

We're approaching the end of our fiscal year, and given all the swirl in the economy, I thought it worthwhile to restate where Sun's headed as a company, to let customers, partners, employees and investors see and understand where we're headed. Clarity's always useful, doubly so in times of uncertainty.

Let me start by joining the chorus of those worried about the global economy. I am routinely talking to customers now partially owned by governments, whose share prices have declined 95% or more, whose balance …

This Thursday (March 5th, 14:00 UTC), Konstantin Osipov will give a MySQL University session on Good Coding Style. Konstantin is the lead of the server runtime environment team, and has been around at MySQL since 2003.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, and more.) All MySQL University sessions are recorded, that is, slides and voice can be viewed as a Flash movie (.flv). You can find those …

As part of Sun's university relations, seven Sun engineers- Vadiraj, Varun, Blessen, Lawrence, Nirmal, Gautham and yours truly went to Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore during the past weekend for a multi-track technology talks on Java ME, GlassFish, MySQL, JavaFX, Open Solaris Virtualization technologies.

There were three parallel tracks:

• J2ME, GlassFish, MySQL- which form a nice combination of Client, Middleware and Database technologies and our (Vadiraj, Varun and Me) idea was to give hints here and there to the students how to bring all the three technolgies to develop applications and how each fits into the holistic idea. My MySQL slides are available here.
• JavaFX
…

As part of Sun's university relations, seven Sun engineers- Vadiraj, Varun, Blessen, Lawrence, Nirmal, Gautham and yours truly went to Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore during the past weekend for a multi-track technology talks on Java ME, GlassFish, MySQL, JavaFX, Open Solaris Virtualization technologies.

There were three parallel tracks:

• J2ME, GlassFish, MySQL- which form a nice combination of Client, Middleware and Database technologies and our (Vadiraj, Varun and Me) idea was to give hints here and there to the students how to bring all the three technolgies to develop applications and how each fits into the holistic idea. My MySQL slides are available here.
• JavaFX …

My calendar for the upcoming months is already filling up with conferences, trade fairs and other events at which I'll speak about MySQL. Here's a quick overview:

• This coming Thursday at 15:00 CET, I'll be speaking about "Backing up MySQL using file system snapshots" at the MySQL University. The session will be hosted live using DimDim, which is a great online conferencing and presentation system (Flash required). Attendance is free, so come and join me if you want to learn more about this backup technique!
• On Friday, 6th of March at 15:15 I'll give a presentation about "MySQL Backup and Security" in the …

This Thursday (February 26th, 14:00 UTC), Lenz Grimmer will give a MySQL University session on Backing up MySQL using file system snapshots. Lenz is a member of the MySQL Community team and the maintainer of the mylvmbackup tool. mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of a MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.

For MySQL University sessions, point …

I had the pleasure of addressing a crowd of over 1,000+ people yesterday, at the Sun Tech Days event in Hyderabad. I think this might as well be the biggest number of attendees at a talk that I’ve given. I spoke on MySQL: The Database for Web 2.0, and the notes for this talk are largely indexed at MySQL for Developers. Its more or less the standard deck for the Tech Days events these days.

The best part? The questions. I had intelligent questions, and they lasted well over twenty minutes, and there was even more chatter afterwards. Twenty minutes might not seem like a lot, but this is Asia, and in some audiences, you’d be hard pressed to get even a single question! MySQL is hot, in India. Really, really, hot.

I’m glad …

South Californians, mark your calendars! On February 24th at 7,30pm the Los Angeles Meetup Group will host Chris Schneider, Facebook DBA, who will talk about "Scaling MySQL".

Now, if I talk about scaling MySQL, I will refer to personal experience in my consulting career, when 10 million people connected all at once to my customer's web site. You may be interested in the story or simply yawn. But when a Facebook DBA talks to you about scaling, 10 million connection is low traffic, and scaling takes a completely different meaning.

In this meetup, Chris will talk about different methodologies used at Facebook to deal with their scaling issues. If you are near Los Angeles on February 24th, you don't want to miss this …