The MySQL sessions at Collaborate started strong after an amazing keynote by former astronaut Mark Kelly about working to become a naval aviator, astronaut, and helping his wife — Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords — after an assassination attempt on her life last year.

A rare moment when the Oracle demo pods where not wall to wall people.

First up was Set up MySQL in Five Minutes by Bob Burgess of Radian6. Most of the attendees to these sessions seem to be long time Oracle DBAs looking to add more MySQL skills or long time Oracle AND MySQL DBAs. Bob then had a second session and covered Shell Scripting for MySQL Administration where most of the crowd of twenty had already had lots of shell programming experience.

BYU’s Dr. Mike McLaughin …

Collaborate is in Las Vegas next and the MySQL Community Team will be there promoting MySQL. Keith Larson and I are presenting two sessions on MySQL for Oracle DBAs or How to Speak MySQL for Beginners. More and more Oracle DBAs are discovering MySQL among their corporate infrastructure and need a little guidance to walk them through some of the differences between Oracle 11g and MySQL. Several years ago, the IOUG said 70% of their members use MySQL and it should be much higher by now. Please drop by the demo between sessions!

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Be sure to register for Oracle MySQL Innovation Day before space is filled. The list of presenters is still being finanlized but please beleve me that the lsit includes some very detailed presentations from MySQL Engineers. If you want heavy duty tech talks on MySQL, do not miss this show.

The MySQL Community Team won a MySQL Community Awards: Corporate Contributor award. On behalf my fellow MySQL Community Manager Keith Larson and myself, we would like to thank those who apprecaited our efforts. But it is not just Keith and I — we have a strong team that is achored by amazing developers, marketeers, salespersons, managers, engineers of several varieties, and many more hard working folks who regularly make us look good. Lots of hard work of folks you do not see at conferences go into making being on the MySQL Community Team look good.

With this award the panel wishes to acknowledge the Oracle MySQL Community team especially for the free tech tours and developer workshops they arrange around the world and their participation at conferences of many kinds. This MySQL evangelization reaches a unique audience, many of …

The MySQL Connect Conference call for papers will open on April 16, 2012 for approximately three weeks. We are looking for those of you in the community who want to present on what you are doing with MySQL in the areas of Performance and Scalability, High Availability, Cloud Computing, Architecture and Design, Database Administration, and Application Development. This will be an amazing show and we want you to be a part of it — so write up a session description and you have until the 16th to make it shine!

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I will be at SITE, The Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education, on Wednesday March 7th presenting Teaching Database Concepts with Open Source Software. There has been a time change to 5:15 P.M. so please note the change. My colleagues are probably tired of me talking about ‘preaching to the converted’ at Open Source conferences and hopefully the MySQL theme will resonate with teachers. Schools are facing ever smaller budgets and dwindling resources. So hopefully the idea of Open Source software can catch on there and MySQL can become even more ubiquitous.

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I will be speaking at Confoo this Friday on The Care and Feeding of a MySQL Database and Explain. And the week after, I will be in Austin for the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education conference presenting Teaching Database Concepts with Open Source Software on the 7th from 6:30 to 8:00 PM before heading off to 6th Street (Y’all welcome to join me!).

And thanks to all the folks who attended PHP UK for making Andres, Johannes and me so welcome last week.

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The PHP UK 2012 has started and the three meetings rooms are packed. The show continues on Saturday the 25th where you cam catch me talking about the latest changes in MySQL at 1400, Johannes Schluter sharing the secrets of PHP under the hood at 1600, and then both of us are on a panel SQL versus NoSQL at 1650. If you are in the area, be sure to drop by!

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I will be speaking on new MySQL features at the PHP UK conference on February 25th in London. A few days later on march 3rd, I will be presenting the Care and Feeding of a MySQL Database at Confoo in Montreal. If you are attending either event, please introduce yourself!

Fellow Community Manager Keith Larson and I working hard to keep up with all the upcoming shows. If you think we might have not notices your upcoming event, please drop us a line. We will have thumb drive, baggage tags, stickers, and maybe (fingers crossed) t-shirts or plush dolphins soon.

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MySQL Day at SCaLE

The MySQL Day at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) is all but over with just a Birds of a Feather Session before we finish. The room was packed all day and often at standing room only. Thanks to all the SCaLE volunteers and especially Solomon Chang who was the MC for the room.

Thanks to Lynn Ferrante, Keith Larson, Colin Charles and Max Mether for presenting. And thanks for those who attended the sessions. Sorry we didn’t have more seats and we will see what we can do for 2013!

SCaLE runs for two more days and there are a few more MySQL sessions scheduled. If you are in the area of LAX, you really need to be here.

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