Well, nobody from Sun showed up in person, but we got a great rendition of "Where were you when you heard THE NEWS that Sun bought MySQL?" from Mark Rubin, the MySQL Sales Engineer for the New England area, and from Giuseppe Maxia, who revealed something very interesting and riveting. From there, Giuseppe gave a short talk on what it's like to work at MySQL, and then we moved on to the topic of the user group meeting, "What is MySQL Cluster Good For?" The slides for the talk are downloadable in PDF Format 61kB and Flash (SWF) format, 31kB The video can be played at http://technocation.org/node/572/play and downloaded (404 Mb) at http://technocation.org/node/572/download

The last keynote of Tuesday evening at OSCon 2008 was entitled "Temporarily Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces.....Made Easy!" Damian Conway is a speaker that should not be missed. He spends his time hacking perl to do fascinating and obscure feats of technology such as time travel. This video is just over an hour of rolling laughter that will entertain you into realizing what a genius Damian Conway is. Now, most of my exposure is within the MySQL Community, so if folks could pass the links to the video along to other communities, that would be great. (This video is at 1.0 Mb/sec. Watch the video online at http://technocation.org/node/571/play or download it at http://technocation.org/node/571/download. Please do not download the file if you are on the conference network, these links are not time sensitive.)

Yesterday I had a good conversation with Monty Widenius (a MySQL founder) about MySQL 5.1. Specifically, about the fact that MySQL 5.1 is not a GA (generally available) release.

My impression, which was wrong, was that it was difficult getting critical mass to download 5.1 and use it simply because ...

This week, database blogs seemed to talk about conforming to stereotypes as well as breaking them.

Fulfilling the stereotype of Microsoft software being unsecure, Microsoft released a very important SQL Server update that Aaron Bertrand notes patches "four elevation of privilege vulnerabilities." That's right, not one, not two, but four!!! ...

By "Good SQL Querying", I am not referring to "how to make your queries more perfomant." I am about to go on a mini-rant about how to make readable and self-documenting SQL queries.

One practice that will get me instantly going on a rant is using a comma join. ...

In http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/07/01/should-we-proclaim-mysql-..., Peter Zaitsev wonders if MySQL's community edition is dead.

The title of Peter's inquiry is somewhat misleading, as the database itself works fine. He clarifies a bit with, "there suppose to be 2 yearly binary releases (which are overdue) and 4 predictable yearly source releases, which we have ...

I was contacted by the folks at MONyog and asked if I would review MONyog. Since using MONyog is something I have been wanting to do for a while, I jumped at the chance. Of course, "jumped" is relative; Rohit asked me at the MySQL User Conference back ...

Usenix 2008 - Automated System Management, by Æleen Frisch of Exponential Consulting (and numerous books)

What is automation?

generic [perl|shell] scripts with cron,at

Problem: overlap of effort

So folks developed automation systems. General automation tools are around:

cfengine, puppet, cfg2

These are general -- files, directories, etc. Don't need to use chmod and ...

From 7:30 - 8:30 pm tonight, Wed. June 25th, in the Berkeley room of the Sheraton Boston, I will be hosting a Birds of a Feather conversation entitled "Pros and Cons of Managed Services". This will go beyond MySQL and even beyond remote database management, and just deal with ...

I was asked today about the ANSI_QUOTES SQL mode.

According to http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/server-sql-mode.html, ANSI_QUOTES mode changes the functionality of double quotes (") to be like the backtick (`). Normally the functionality of double quotes is more like that of single quotes (').

You might use this when you have a table with ...