I am happy and pleased to announce the 2009 MySQL Unconference. The Unconference is a free conference that gives the community a chance to participate without having to incur the large expense of the official conference. Community members old and new will be on hand to speak, answer questions, give advice and generally help out. It will be taking place at the same time and place as the MySQL Conference and Expo — (well, almost the same time).

The grand scale details:
Sunday, April 19 2009 - Wed. April 22 2009 (the MySQL conference goes until Thursday)

The Hyatt Regency Santa Clara
5101 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara, CA 95054
USA

Phone: (408) 200-1234
Fax: (408) 980-3990

The Unconference will be held in the Bayshore room (on the hotel mezzanine).

When you make your travel plans, keep in mind that the Unconference starts with an informal games day on Sunday (see …

The one thing that has consumed my days (and nights) recently, has been the organising of the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 (hereinafter, referred to as the CE2009).

For starters, we’ve had 356 proposals. That basically provides a 1:3 acceptance:rejection ratio. So the voting committee had a really, really hard task to look at talks. Some even cross-referenced submissions with other submissions. Some even made suggestions of combining talks (successful, even). So my great thanks to the voting committee for the CE2009 - you guys all rock.

Then, once the voting committee has done the hard work, you’ve got to sanely schedule the talks. This is really, not an easy task. Very quickly, you realise that you want to be in all track, and you’ve got to split yourselves. This, being impossible, however, leaves room for the community (and in the past, …

All of the videos from the 2008 MySQL Conference have been processed and uploaded. Links to the videos, slides, notes, photos for each presentation are all on the mega-conference page at:
http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008Notes

This represents many hours of my own toil, but it also reflects plenty of people who have blogged, edited the wiki pages and speakers who wrote and gave tutorials and presentations. I am proud of everyone’s efforts to offer so many learning resources for free….

Enjoy! EDIT: I forgot to thank Jay, the folks at O’Reilly and all the speakers for giving me explicit permission to video and freely offer their presentations.

If you know of any video, audio, notes, slides, photos, etc that are not linked, please link them at the wiki page. If you can’t or won’t, please comment here and I will update the wiki …

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.

Here are my liveblogging notes from MySQL Sandbox: Easily Using Multiple Database Servers in Isolation by Giuseppe Maxia

Giuseppe has been a community member since 2001, and in the past year or so, a MySQL Employee.

He likes to give things away for free — he gave away T-shirts to the early arrivers to the workshop, and that’s why he’s giving away the sandbox as well. The sandbox is NOT an official MySQL product. It is released from GPL, available from http://sf.net/projects/mysql-sandbox.

Why the sandbox? To be able to set up 1 server in under 10 seconds. And to be able to set up multiple MySQL instances very quickly, and to use them quickly.

The sandbox untars in seconds, for …

Yesterday I presented “Best Practices for Database Administrators” at the MySQL User Conference and Expo. I was successful in streaming the live video on www.ustream.tv, and you can see it in totality at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/352479.

The slides are available in pdf form. And here are some of the links I spoke about:

cacti
nagios
rt

MySQL 5.0 manual
…

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 …

Hello everyone who is attending MySQLConf 2008!

I am finally able to announce when and where the Pythian BoF session has been scheduled! It will be in the Alameda room, 7:30-8:30pm on Tuesday, April 15th.

The session, titled “Ask the Pythian Maestro”, will be attended by myself and our two MySQL team leads, Sheeri K. Cabral and Augusto Bott.

This should be a fun session and hopefully people will show up. Attendees will get to:

• Schmooze with Augusto, Sheeri, and I, ask us your technical questions and find out if we know what we’re talking about
• Meet active Pythian customers - I have just been informed of the schedule and I am hopeful that several can attend
• Find out what it’s like to work at Pythian if that’s what you’re in to
• Find out what it’s like to have Pythian as …

If you can’t attend the MySQL Conference, you can still virtually attend

Simply visit
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/oursql-the-mysql-database-videocast

2-3 pm PDT on Tuesday, April 15th for the “Best Practices for Database Administrators” session,

and

11:55 am -12:40 pm PDT on Thursday, April 17th for the “Database Security Using White-Hat Google Hacking” session.

You need nothing but your web browser; unlike some other live meetings, audio streams from the website too, so there’s no phone number to call or participant code or anything. There’s also a live chat so you can participate and ask questions while the session is going on.

See you soon, virtually!

http://tinyurl.com/2qmusm

Need I say more? Go download the slides, video and audio from the 2007 MySQL Users Conference & Expo. I have no plans to take anything down, so please download wisely, and take only what you need. If there’s demand, I can make higher-quality versions available. I can also burn DVD’s of the content if that’s desired.

Enjoy!