I just got back from 3 days of conferences - 2 days at Velocity and one at Structure '08. The Velocity Conference was billed as the 1st conference devoted exclusively to web performance and operations. And the sessions did live up to this. They had over 700 attendees which is not bad for the first time.

Being a performance person, I chose to mostly attend the performance sessions. What I found was that  the sessions were heavily geared towards the client-side. There were sessions on how to tune your javascript, images, reduce network traffic etc. - all trying to reduce the end-user response time.

Our session was of course on tuning the server-side. There was another one on squid/varnish and mysql sharding - but beyond that, client …

I just got back from 3 days of conferences - 2 days at Velocity and one at Structure '08. The Velocity Conference was billed as the 1st conference devoted exclusively to web performance and operations. And the sessions did live up to this. They had over 700 attendees which is not bad for the first time.

Being a performance person, I chose to mostly attend the performance sessions. What I found was that  the sessions were heavily geared towards the client-side. There were sessions on how to tune your javascript, images, reduce network traffic etc. - all trying to reduce the end-user response time.

Our session was of course on tuning the server-side. There was another one on squid/varnish and mysql sharding - but beyond that, client …

I just got back from 3 days of conferences - 2 days at Velocity and one at Structure '08. The Velocity Conference was billed as the 1st conference devoted exclusively to web performance and operations. And the sessions did live up to this. They had over 700 attendees which is not bad for the first time.

Being a performance person, I chose to mostly attend the performance sessions. What I found was that  the sessions were heavily geared towards the client-side. There were sessions on how to tune your javascript, images, reduce network traffic etc. - all trying to reduce the end-user response time.

Our session was of course on tuning the server-side. There was another one on squid/varnish and mysql sharding - but beyond that, client …

The next release of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, will have ZFS enabled by default. There’s a good article for the masses, at ZDNet on ZFS on Snow Leopard - do read it.

We all know running any form of server using HFS+ tends to be a bit of a joke. So, Snow Leopard Server will be where ZFS makes its debut. It won’t be long before regular users will want it in their Mac Pro’s and so on…

OS X as a deployment platform for production MySQL servers? This is not far off, I’m sure.

While we're on the topic of Bazaar - this week I got informed by the organizers of the FrOSCon 2008 conference that they accepted two of my talk proposals: one session will be an introduction to this source code management system (what a coincidence), the other one will be an introduction to OpenSolaris for Linux users, explaining some of the underlying technologies and how they differ from what a seasoned Linux user may be accustomed to.

And no, I have not given up on using Linux - quite the contrary! I have been very impressed by the latest OpenSUSE 11.0 release and already run it for since quite some time on several of my work systems. In fact, I already convinced several colleagues of mine to …

During the last month, MySQL code has been migrated from BitKeeper to Bazaar. Bazaar is a distributed, free revision control system sponsored and supported by Canonical, the company behind the fast-growing Linux distribution Ubuntu.

We have migrated all MySQL code trees that were available in BitKeeper. This means not just current GA and development versions of MySQL Server and MySQL Cluster, but also the history all the way back to MySQL 3.23.22 released about eight years ago. And we’ve also migrated non-MySQL-server FOSS applications to Bazaar, such as MySQL Workbench (formerly not in BitKeeper but in Subversion, also known as svn) and our internal QA suites.

…

This blog posting has little to do with MySQL or Sun. It’s about experiences gathered while shuttling around the world as MySQL’s Ambassador to Sun, but it’s not about databases, it’s not about operating systems, nor computer languages: it’s about human languages, and how going beyond English provides a business advantage.

Let me try to grab your attention by first sharing my perhaps somewhat controversial conclusion:

English as a language of communication is much overrated. In an international setting, English may be sufficient for conveying meaning, but it has severe deficiencies when it comes to establishing a social relationship, to showing respect, to building trust, and to having fun.

For many years, I have attempted at learning how to say “thank you” and “please don’t smoke” and “where is …

If you happen to be in Munich, Germany next week, don't miss out the final Sun/MySQL launch event which will take place on Thursday, 26th of June at the "Sofitel Munich Bayerpost", Bayerstraße 12, D-80335 München.

Simon Phipps will speak about "Sun and Open Source - How it has changed the industry", Kaj Arnö will give a talk about the positioning, strategy and momentum of MySQL as a part of Sun. Other speakers include Donatus Schmidt (Marketing Director Sun Germany) and Ralf Gebhardt (Sales Engineer, MySQL). You can see the entire agenda here, you need to …

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 …