If you’re like me and are a DBA in the UK with a penchant for MySQL or Oracle, you’ll know we have a smörgåsbord of conferences here next week. We’ve been waiting, and like buses two have come at once. We have the UK Oracle User Group Conference 2012, in Birmingham on 3rd – 5th [...]

Andrew Moore and Ben Mildren return from Ottawa to Bristol to London all in the name of MySQL

A client of ours is just getting started with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and I wonder as time marches on how popular this cloud solution is going to play out for them and Amazon as a valid/useable service offering. Many times in the past we have encountered off-the-shelf solutions from vendor A based on [...]

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 …

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 …

Every time I have had the pleasure of attending Oracle Open World, I have discovered a plethora of technical heavy-weights from all over the world in attendance. I enjoy meeting and shmoozing with these people almost as much as absorbing the technical content of the show itself. Many of my Pythian colleagues are presenting at [...]

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 …

Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just over a month away, and yes, we are organizing the Annual Oracle Bloggers Meetup — one of your top favorite events of OpenWorld.

What: Oracle Bloggers Meetup 2012

When: Wed, 3-Oct-2012, 5:30pm

Where: Main Dining Room, Jillian’s Billiards @ Metreon, 101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 ( …

This past week I attended OSCon, the annual conference for open source’s true believers. And there was a religious fervor in the air, particularly from the point of view of someone more accustomed to Oracle conferences.

And if open source is the religion, proprietary closed-source companies are the devil. That having been said, I was surprised how virtually all large companies were demonized. Even long-time defenders of open source like IBM were ignored at best. That didn’t prevent them from coming though, with Microsoft and HP in particular with high-profile sponsorships and PR offensives that didn’t seem to have much influence with the crowd.

The companies generating buzz were the small companies built around development of their own open source products. There are a surprising number of them out there, especially relating to multiple forks of a popular product like MySQL or …