Oracle Open World 2012, this year, was all about Cloud, 12c, Exadata, Fusion, SuperClusters, social media, content management and much more. From operating systems to databases, and from applications to interactive media, professionals all around the world presented, attended, and networked in San Francisco. MySQL’S professionals also rocked massively. SQL Server bloggers also remained actively [...]

Another good day today: I attended the keynotes and found them quite interesting.

I especially liked the way Twitter uses MySQL to build up a NoSQL solution. Jokes aside, I took a few notes on things I must analyze and dig in.

The introduction of the Paypal models seemed very interesting, which brought me to attend the presentation later on. It was well constructed and had some good theoretical work, but I was quite disappointed. I found the presentation incomplete and missing real numbers for the MySQL Cluster NDB setup.

I attended the presentation done by Ronald B. It was good — nothing really advanced, but it was on purpose. He was very informative and explanatory for a junior MySQL DBA, and I enjoyed his presentation for the logical approach and construction.

Ronald also highlighted that it was the content of less then a chapter of one of his books and was done on purpose to give an initial understanding of …

I attend five sessions today, and I think that some of them were very interesting, like the one on the Optimizer insight. It was quite informative and accurate.

Another one, done by the MySQL Cluster (NDB) group on the installer and new Javascript API interface, left me a little bit…foggy. Why? Because in my mind, one of the most important things to accomplish in NDB is the correct dimensioning of the memory, buffers, possible operation, attributes, and so on. All these things should come from the schema definition review and from the application analysis.

Now given the review analysis of the schema is still not present in the installer, I think that we missed a very important piece of information. When I raised the issue, Bernd mentioned that they were thinking of integrating that as well. It’s a good move, and I hope to see it soon. About the JavaScript API, I honestly think this was a real waste of …

With Oracle OpenWorld just around the corner & MySQL Connect already underway I can’t believe yet another year has passed.  This is my third OOW and I must have a following as folks are already reaching out to me on twitter @pythiansimmons (log buffer lady seems to be a handle I can’t seem to shake). [...]

I’m excited to be here not only to catch up with old friends and ex-colleagues, but also to witness what seems to be the start of a very significant conference from MySQL.

I really enjoyed the introductions done by Edward Screven and Thomas Ulin. Edward highlighted the fact that MySQL is increasing its presence in the market and in the community. This could be thanks to the unbelievable effort done by Oracle in keeping its production cycle on target. Thomas stressed that point and gave a great description of it. He demonstrated Oracle’s main focus points, which are mainly on InnoDB, with implementation and enhancement of the internal contentions, then on Optimizer improvements and NoSQL integration.

Replication remains a pending issue from my side because if we have the global transaction ID, we still suffer from delay in replication given that parallel replication is still working by, schema and not …

In honor of our fifteenth anniversary, I have assembled a few nostalgic items from our earliest years in business.

On September 7, 1997 I went to the Ottawa U public library to come up with some names for the company Steve Pickard and I wanted to found the next morning. The goal was to choose the company name, register the dot-com, and then go incorporate it. I really felt that I lucked out when I discovered the word Pythian, which means “about the Pythia“. The Pythia was the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece. (Remember that we launched as an Oracle ecosystem services company, and our other practices came afterwards with MySQL launching in 2002 and SQL Server launching in 2005).

I was also delighted that the Pythian Games were also hosted by the Pythia, and those were the most important …

MySQL is one of the most, if not the most, popular relational databases chosen by internet based startups in the last decade. Although it is a very robust platform and offers many of the necessary features to support the database needs of today’s internet giants, it also suffers from some security issues that must be addressed prior to production use.

This article will discuss the necessary steps to secure a basic MySQL installation and additionally cover more advanced topics for general database security as would be applied to general production environments.

Functionality

The following general statements apply to this security discussion:

•This is a discussion of MySQL as installed on Linux; Windows, OSX, Solaris, and BSD installations may differ and the differences are not covered here.

•MySQL will be handling generic web traffic as is commonly found on PHP, Python, Perl, and …

This week, ten years ago, I was in London for MySQL AB‘s first “train the trainer” course, also meeting (for the first time) my first boss at MySQL Kaj. I’d been hired mid August as employee#25, also doing training but actually primarily as tech-writer for the MySQL documentation (taking over from Jeremy Cole, and essentially I was the documentation team for quite some time . So from this you can deduce that yes, I was hired without meeting either Kaj or anyone in-person! I don’t think we even had a phone call, only email. Oh the days

The training week itself was of course disrupted quite a bit by the events in New York. We had Jeremy who had come on a UA flight from the US, and others from all over the place… it also taught …

Isn’t that that time of the year again? Yes, it is — it’s time for our annual Oracle Bloggers Meetup and of course Oracle is piggybacking OpenWorld with the meetup again! ;) What: Oracle Bloggers Meetup 2011 When: Wed, 5-Oct-2011, 5:00pm Where: Main Dining Room, Jillian’s Billiards @ Metreon, 101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA [...]

Pythian’s Oracle ACE, Fahd Mirza appears in this month’s Community: Peer-to-Peer review “In With the New“, as published in the September/October 2011 issue of Oracle Magazine.

Fahd states that “Oracle Exadata Database Machine” has most changed his life – changing the game, and setting very high standards of performance, support, scalability, reliability and unification.

Shout out to Fahd from your peers at Pythian!

I guess there might be just a little truth to Pythian’s growing reputation as an “Oracle ACE Factory” ;), as recently mentioned by Justin Kestelyn in the May 11, 2011 OPN PartnerCast:

Please join me in congratulating Fahd by adding a …