sheeri's blog

During OSCon, I went to dinner with a bunch of MySQL folks - Henrik, Mats, Lars, and Rich (audio engineer for the OurSQL podcast). On the recommendation of some friends in Portland, we went to Le Bistro Montage. There, we raised our shot glasses (full of an oyster shooter) and sang Helan Går (well, I did not sing because I have not familiarized myself with the song -- I am not a big drinker!)

Exactly one month from today, OpenSQLCamp Boston 2010 will begin its technical content (we will have a social event on Friday evening, Oct. 15th, starting no earlier than 6 pm). Have you registered yet? It's 100% free! Make sure to get your flight before next week or the costs will go up, as it is generally more expensive to book a flight within 21 days of your trip. Also do not forget to book your hotel, we have a good rate of $149 per night for single or double occupancy....click here for details.

Special thanks to Tim Callaghan for giving a fantastic presentation of VoltDB at Monday's Boston MySQL User Group meeting. Even though the title was "for SQL developers" there was a lot of content for DBAs as well (how backups are done, what the data and server-level architecture is, etc). It was an EXCELLENT presentation on how VoltDB works, and what applications it is and is not appropriate for. The video is almost 2 hours long; there's a LOT of excellent information in it.

The slides can be downloaded (PPT format) from:
http://technocation.org/files/doc/2010_09_VoltDB.ppt

There are approximately 3 weeks left to submit your MySQL DBA-related presentations to Collaborate 2011, held in Orlando, FL April 10-14. Experience has shown that the best presentations are submitted well in advance of the deadline, so now is a great time to submit while you have plenty of time to create a good abstract.

Information and the link to submit abstracts are at http://collaborate11.ioug.org/. I posted a cheat sheet on how to fill out the Call for Presentations for MySQLers a while ago, and as always feel free to ask me any questions.

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If you are not familiar with OpenSQLCamp, here's a description from the home page at http://opensqlcamp.org/:

OpenSQL Camp is open to all – sessions have included PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL (and storage engines and forks thereof), Drizzle (and tools such as Google Proto Buffers), DBIx::Cache, Gearman, cloud computing, Unix tips, query optimization, Apache Derby, BlackRay, Continuent Tungsten, DB Clustering, Firebird, CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, Firewater, how to version schemas, Waffle Grid / Storm Cloud, databases on SSDs, and even "soft" topics like the Open Database Alliance.

I am very happy to announce that I have secured a great rate at a hotel for OpenSQLCamp (a free weekend conference for open source databases such as MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, and NoSQL databases). We have a room block at the Doubletree Club Hotel Boston Bayside at 24 Mt. Vernon Street in Boston at a rate of $149 per night, for single or double occupancy*, for both Friday night, October 15 and Saturday night, October 16. Wireless internet access, which is usually $9.95 per night, is included in the room fee, so there's no hidden extra there. There is also a free shuttle from Boston's Logan Airport to the hotel**. The subway is steps away from both the hotel and the venue (MIT Stata Center on the corner of Main and Vassar Streets in Cambridge). Subway fare is $2.00 each way, so if you stay at the hotel you'd have $8 extra in transportation fee.

You can reserve your room by booking here. You are responsible for paying for your own room. Some more useful information:

Collaborate 2011 is a database operational conference to be held in Orlando, Florida April 10th - 14th 2011. Unfortunately, the O'Reilly MySQL Conference has been scheduled for the same week; however, I am working with the conference committee to make sure that speakers that want to attend both are scheduled appropriately (I intend on going to both!). The call for presentations is now open through the end of September, so you have just over a month to submit your proposals. Experience has shown that the best presentations are submitted well in advance of the deadline -- I guess when folks are time-crunched by the deadline they do not make such great abstracts....Speakers whose presentations are accepted receive free admission to the conference and a speaker thank-you gift.

Firstly, if you have not yet seen the Session Schedule for OpenSQLCamp 2010 Germany, take a look -- great work Lenz! I am sad that I will be missing it on Aug 21-22nd.

However, this post is mostly about OpenSQLCamp Boston, which I am planning. I am working on a good hotel room rate -- hotel rooms in the Boston area are pricey, and I'm trying to work out something at $159 per night or lower. I will let you know if that happens, otherwise we will probably be on our own for hotel rooms.

If the MySQL site (including documentation) isn't working for you, try a mirror site.

"But," you ask, "how do I know what the mirror sites are if I can't access the site?"

Great question! Technocation has a mirror site (updated daily) at http://technocation.org/mirror/mysql/.

Also, we have purchased www.mysqlmirrors.com which points to the official list of mirrors at http://technocation.org/mirror/mysql/downloads/mirrors.html.

In the past few days it has come to my attention that some people are having problems with Percona's blog at http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com. I was told that trackbacks seem to be broken and some comments were not showing up.

Anyone else having any problems with what looks like censorship? [edit: trackbacks were a technical error, Dave's comment was trapped in a spam trap. Still looking for people to comment whether or not they're seeing a similar issue, as it's important for people to check to see if their comments are showing up.]

Eric Day and Patrick Galbraith spoke on Drizzle, Gearman and Narada at the July 2009 Boston MySQL User Group. This is part 1 of the video, which is about an hour long and is about Drizzle.

"We will explain what the Drizzle project is, what we aim to accomplish, and an overview of where we are at."

The slides can be downloaded from http://www.oddments.org/notes/DrizzleGearmanBoston2009.pdf

The User Group calendar item for this event is http://www.meetup.com/mysqlbos/calendar/10607736/

Video for the presentation at the 2009 MySQL Camp:
Chasing Bottlenecks
by Morgan Tocker

Description:
The best way to performance tune a system is to find out what your bottlenecks are, and attacking those first. In the first part of this session, I'll be looking at some of the issues faced with common database workloads. From there, I'll then be showing how you can get more information out of MySQL and your Operating System to find out about your workload. This session is designed for beginner to intermediate MySQL users.