Silona Bonewald, the lady always in a hat (she says that it’s just become an extension of her). Describe her, by her tags: open government, open data, open standards, and databases.

(watch the video if your feed reader strips it out)

Silona’s the founder of The League of Technical Voters, which allows technical people to be more involved in voting process. As part of this, she created the Transparent Federal Budget, with Bill Bradley and Jimmy Wales.

On top of all that, she’s also the open source evangelist for grid.org. The …

Well, nobody from Sun showed up in person, but we got a great rendition of “Where were you when you heard THE NEWS that Sun bought MySQL?” from Mark Rubin, the MySQL Sales Engineer for the New England area, and from Giuseppe Maxia, who revealed something very interesting and riveting.

From there, Giuseppe gave a short talk on what it’s like to work at MySQL, and then we moved on to the topic of the user group meeting, “What is MySQL Cluster Good For?”

The slides for the talk are downloadable in PDF Format 61kB and Flash (SWF) format, 31kB

The video can be played at http://technocation.org/node/572/play and …

Interested in MySQL? Drizzle? How the Sun acquisition is going for MySQL? Listen to Brian, Monty, and Tim speak about this, at the OSCON panel. Watch the video, its 20+ minutes, it starts off a bit shaky (oops), but I’m mostly happy with the rest. Enjoy.

I’m at the Sun Tech Days in beautiful Philippines, and all I can say is the energy is tremendous. I’m hearing there are about 1,400 attendees, and this number might grow tomorrow.

Armed with a video camera, I decided to take a few video snapshots. My first victimguest on my yet to be named videocast is Wen Huang, Product Manager for NetBeans, at Sun Microsystems.

Wen Huang has been a MySQL user since 1999, and had a past life as a web developer in various web shops, some large, some small. One commonality he had at all his jobs though is that they always use MySQL.

He’s an action junkie, preferring to have the latest version of the MySQL database all the time, and can’t wait for MySQL 5.1 when …

The Boston MySQL User Group was lucky enough to get Keith Murphy to speak at the June User Group meeting, about backups.

Direct play the video at:
http://technocation.org/node/559/play

Direct download the video (351 MB) at:
http://technocation.org/node/559/download

Links referred to in the presentation:

MyLVMBackup by Lenz Grimmer
http://lenz.homelinux.org/mylvmbackup/

InnoDB Hot Backup:
Prices are at:
http://www.innodb.com/hot-backup/order/
and at the time of this writing are:
1-Year License ? 390 USD$ 605 per server
…

At the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, Britt Crawford and Justin McCarthy, both from Cafepress.com, gave us a very interesting talk on scaling with HiveDB. I took a few notes (pasted below), their slides are online (warning: 6.1MB PDF), and if you’re after their abstract its available as well.

I also took a video of them (refer to Slide 12, for the IRC conversation):

The quick notes:

• OLTP optimised (as it serves cafepress.com)
• Cannot lock tables, or take it offline
• Constant response time is more important than low latency (little slower query is ok, just not exponentially …

I have already blogged about this keynote at http://www.pythian.com/blogs/948/liveblogging-who-is-the-dick-on-my-site.

If you are interested in actually seeing the video, the 286 Mb .wmv file can be downloaded at http://technocation.org/videos/original/mysqlconf2008/2008_04_17_panelDick.wmv and played through your browser by clicking the “play” link at http://tinyurl.com/55c5ps. This is not to be missed!

Yesterday’s keynote panel on “Scaling MySQL — Up or Out?”

Directly download the 310MB wmv file (not if you are on the conference wireless please!), or watch it in your browser via streaming — simply click the “play” link on this page.

Keith Murphy managed to take painstaking notes with all the facts and figures. As well, Venu Anuganti presents a chart with the results as well as notes on the more detailed answers. Ronald Bradford has a brief summary of the 20 seconds of wisdom from each panelist.

Jonathan Schwartz’s Keynote at the 2008 MySQL Conference can be played directly in your browser or you can download the 147MB .wmv file. (Please do not download the movie on the conference wireless system!)

I finally realized who Jonathan Schwartz reminds me of:

That’s right, comedian and magician Penn Jillette.

Schwartz started by saying, “enough of this free software stuff!” It got lots of laughs. He started to talk about Sun’s agenda, and mentioned that MySQL and Sun had similar values, as well as similar dysfunctions as well — particularly that each engineer has his/her own opinion.

But Schwartz goes on in earnest to say “The …

Luc just pointed me with to his recording of my talk about Drupal and MySQL HA yesterday at the Drupal Room at Fosdem

He also uploaded some other video's from the Drupal room.

More about my Fosdem 2008 experience later :)