My father and I got our 5D MkIIs on Friday and we could hardly wait for the batteries to charge. He took his to SF to test its vaunted low-light performance and posted this 60-second 1080p clip (along with other resolutions) on his SmugMug site: Click to watch it auto-sized for your monitor or check out the full 1080p resolution (caution – *high* bandwidth! UPDATE: Apologies if you tried to watch 1080p on Windows earlier. My bug made it look terrible. Try again, please?).

Here’s his story:

“I had seen Vincent Laforet’s amazing short film, but only in 720p. I knew what an amazing photographer he is and wondered how close an everyman like me could come to footage like that. Could the clips …

Brian Aker delivers the keynote speech at OpenSQL Camp: State of the Open Source Databases. The presentation begins with a disclaimer:
“There is no way I’m going to tell you exactly where the future of databases go. We have way too many egos in the room to ever even begin a discussion…”
and ends with Aker saying,
“What the hell does that mean?”

View the video online at
http://technocation.org/node/649/play
or download the 42.6 MB Flash video file (.flv) directly at http://technocation.org/node/649/download.

My summary: …

Sorry for not updating this blog regularly. My wife's due date is soon so I've busy.

Anyway, I wanted to share this very funny interview with Jonathan Schwartz (puppet):

For those people starting with Kettle (Pentaho Data Integration) we created a Getting Started page on our Wiki.

Since I realized that for some people, simple and easy can never be simple and easy enough I created 8 mini-flash demos :

• Create a new transformation - create a step (flash demo, 0′20″)
• Create a hop between 2 steps (flash demo, 0′20″)
• Create a database connection (flash demo, 0′45″)
• …

Man, this video hits too close to home. Developers all over the world are in pain, so go ahead – hug one right now! Dedicated to all developers at blinkx, MySQL, and beyond.

Robin just wrote a new article, titled A Quick Look at MySQL 6.0’s New Backup, and I thought, that maybe you’d like to also see this in presentation/video format…

At OSCON, Giuseppe actually gave a quick talk at the Sun booth, about our online backup. He also showed how to use it. All examples there, were done with the test-db sample database.

(MySQL Online Backup in Practice, video if the above doesn’t appear)

Michael Widenius, commonly referred to as Monty, gave a very interesting talk on Maria at OSCON 2008. He not only had a talk in the main session, that was well attended, titled Architecture of Maria, the New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL (slides are available in ODP there), he also gave one at the Sun booth, where we were running our own little “unconference”.

For those reading this in a feed reader, there’s a 23 minute video of Monty telling us more about Maria, a bit about its motivations, architecture, and where the team is at now. If you’re interested in grabbing the code, check out the …

Brian Aker was at the Sun booth today, in a premier slot, where there must have been about 50-60 people, huddled around, to listen to him talk about Drizzle. The project motivations, what’s behind it, what its not aimed to be, and so much more. Check the video out (21 minutes long)!

The Birds of a Feather (BoF) session in the night, was well attended, and there was lots of large discussion on what’s next. I think the important message to take away is that Drizzle doesn’t aim to be MySQL, and there are no plans to “merge” things back (fixes where the code-base is shared though, might make sense). Its also important that the design is for the future, i.e. multi-core machines. It was great to see Brian say that this …

We were at the Sun+Zend party last night, and it was a blast (thank you Jesse Silver!). If you’re a PostgreSQL or MySQL user/developer or just a general database geek, you should’ve been there. Why?

(watch the video if its stripped in your feed reader)

Monty Widenius (MySQL) and Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL), decided to start sumo wrestling! It ended with a 5-0 score, advantage MySQL.

An attendee Tim Moore twittered: “Postgres is totally losing the sumo match. I’m migrating all of my databases to MySQL tomorrow.”

Monty says, this is what we do to people that leave Sun! In fact, if you didn’t already know, Josh Berkus, …

Brian Aker gives the “zinger” lightning talk about the newly announced “Drizzle”. This short (under 8 minutes) video captures Aker’s highlights of why he started the Drizzle project and how Drizzle is different from MySQL — both in what has been removed from MySQL and what features Drizzle can accomodate.

Play the video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/576/play or download the 116 Mb file at http://technocation.org/node/576/download.