In addition to having the Malaysia University Days, there’s something brewing in Singapore too.

First up, there is the Singapore MySQL Meetup Group, having a meeting in July, at a new location (Sun Solutions Centre, Central Mall). Confirm your attendance for a meetup at 7pm on Monday, July 14 2008.

And the other reason to be in Singapore, is the Sun Developer Days 2008 Singapore, happening on Tuesday, July 15, 2008. This is an all-day long event, held at the Hilton Hotel - register …

In what I think must be MySQL’s first time in the Philippines, there will be a presence there next week. Well, its not the first time, but in terms of a community/developer event, I think it might be. The Sun Tech Days is happening from 17-19 June 2008, in the Shangri-La Makati.

Besides MySQL, expect great talks on NetBeans, GlassFish, OpenSolaris, and so much more. I’ll be the guy walking around in the MySQL shirt, so feel free to stop me and ask questions. Its exciting for me, as we’ve not really paid much attention to the Philippines, in terms of community growth (and the Philippines is in the APAC region!).

This isn’t a free event (its 1,000 PHP = ~USD23), and registration should still be available. If you’d like to meet up, and talk MySQL, shoot me an email at colinATmysqlDOTcom or …

In my opinion, the last MySQL Meetup group in London was a really good event. We met Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL and now Senior Vice President of Sun, David Axmark, founder of MySQL and Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun.

The main questions to the guests were pretty expected: is it going to change anything in the licensing, the deployment and the platforms of MySQL? The single answer is a "No, nothing is going to change". No change in the licensing (Simon Phipps has clearly stated it), no changes in the Community and Enterprise editions (at least not in the near future) and no changes in the development for Linux, Windows, Solaris and other OSes. There will be more opportunities, instead, of spreading the database in environments that are not the common target for MySQL at the moment. We are definitely not going to inflate the server with a large set of barely …

There is a big event for the London Meetup Group coming up next week. We will all meet on Wednesday 5 March @ 7pm
The location: The Lamb
4 Lambs Conduit St
Bloomsbury
London
WC1N 3LZ

We will have a very special guest: Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL (now in his new role, due to the Sun acquisition). Marten will join us and he will be happy to answer to questions, to share opinions and spend some good time with MySQL Brits users in front of a nice drink (no surprise which one will be the best seller :) ).

From a technical point of you, I have prepared a short presentation on MySQL Proxy, with a basic intro on the project and with some ideas on how to use it and what to expect from a production version. The slides will be uploaded after the venue.

As usual, I am open to suggestions and topics to …

Please feel free to forward to interested parties.

Who: Jim Starkey at the Boston MySQL Meetup Group
What: Falcon, the new MySQL storage engine
When:
Monday, July 10, 2006 at 7:00 PM
Where:
MIT Building E51, Room 372
Wadsworth and Amherst Streets
Cambridge, MA 02117
Steps from the Red line, plenty of free parking.

The July Boston MySQL Meetup’s topic is Falcon, the new storage engine for MySQL. Creator Jim Starkey will speak. Jim Starkey has been writing database software for 20 years. He created BLOBs, multi-versioning concurrency for relational databases, cascading update triggers, event alerters, and more. Read more about him at http://tinyurl.com/lno4p and http://tinyurl.com/mym7d.

We will be meeting on MIT campus, close to the Kendall stop on the Red Line (subway). There is also plenty of free parking — you can park in ANY MIT lot after 3 pm, even if it says …

Note the title is “How I have a successful MySQL Meetup Group.” There’s more than one way to do it, I’m sure. There are 3 basic principles:

1) Try to do as little work as possible.

2) Make your colleagues do as little work as possible.

3) Always have a topic/presentation

These three principles will get you far, and should be weighted equally. Do not use principle # 1 as an excuse to not follow principle #3. As well, “doing work” includes “paying money”. With that being said:

1. Make your meetup easy to get to. This has different meanings for different areas. It may mean near a major highway interchange, it may mean near a mass transit station. Whatever it means for you, make it easy.

When the Boston MySQL Meetup first started, we had free space in an office building right in the city of Boston.

Yet again, the Boston MySQL Meetup was a success. Larry Stefonic, Senior Vice President, Worldwide OEM & Embedded Sales and President, MySQL K.K. (Japan) was on hand to witness the event. There were 15 people total at the meetup, which is our lowest yet, but I’ll get to why I was not disappointed at all later on.

However, the topic was advanced: “Measuring MySQL Server Performance for the Sensor Data Stream Processing” presented by faithful MySQL Meetup attendee Jacob Nikom, from MIT Lincoln Labs. (he’s been to every meetup!)

And I was very impressed with the questions folks asked of Jacob — the group was half the size of what we usually are, but we were all fully engaged. I’m very proud of the MySQL group! We have a diverse range of skills and I’m glad we can accomodate all of them.

Next month’s topic will be “Storing images in a database,” which was pushed out of the way in April to make room for Jay …

Hannah, Scarlet and I attended the Seattle Meetup, since we heard Arjen was planning on being in town. We went to the normal location, but the owner told me they were closed due to their entire staff being involved in the civil rights …

Do you have a users group near you? Is it thriving? In conjunction with Mike Kruckenberg, I’ve been running the Boston MySQL Users Group for 6 months. Every meeting draws 30-60 members, and members overall are quite satisfied.

How do we do it? If you’re at the MySQL Users Conference, come find out at the MySQL Users Group BOF to get tips and tricks, or to share your own success stories and pitfalls. 8:30 -9:30 pm, Tuesday April 25th.

Jay Pipes gave an amazing tutorial on optimizing performance in MySQL by choosing your indexes and joins well. There were plenty of questions from the audience which he handled well, and in style. Over 50 people attended! And I really feel as though everyone learned a lot. The tutorial ran for 3 hours, but we were engaged until the last, and there were 15-20 people even at the bitter end.

Thanx, Jay! I can’t wait to see how the tutorial goes over at the MySQL Users Conference.

Pictures, video, slides and presentations will be up when we get to it.