MySQL user group meeting in Sydney, January 15th

On January 15th I will be in Sydney, Au, on my way to Wellington, New Zealand. I will be at the MySQL User Group, hosted at the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts at 5.30pm. I will talk about testing complex database systems with MySQL Sandbox. The meeting is open to all. If you want to attend, please register at the Sydney MySQL User Group meetup page.

MySQL user group meeting in Dubai, January 13th

On January 13th I will be in Dubai, UAE, on my way to Wellington, New Zealand. I will be at the MySQL User Group, hosted at Sun Microsystems offices at 6pm. I will talk about boosting performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions, covering the recent 5.5. additions. The meeting is open to all. If you want to attend, please register at the meetup page.

Speaking, speaking, speaking: Dubai-Sydney-Wellington

(*)

From January 12th to 27th I will be traveling to the Southern Hemisphere and speaking at two user groups and two conferences. The schedule (see below) is almost scary. I will be talking about Partitioning (Dubai and Wellington), MySQL Sandbox (Sydney and Wellington), Gearman (Wellington), and some general topics now and then.

The complete schedule and location follows:

• January 13th Dubai MySQL User Group
• January 15th Sydney MySQL User Group
• January 18th Open Programming Languages miniconf
• January 19th Data Storage and Retrieval miniconf
• January 20th - 22nd LCA BoF
• January 23th DrupalSouth
• January 24thDrupalSouth

(*) I know. The world map is upside down. That is how you would see it if people in the Southern Hemisphere had started drawing maps before the ones in the North.

Gurus show at the Los Angeles Meetup - April 17

If you are in the Los Angeles area, you have two more chances to meet the MySQL gurus on their way to the the MySQL Conference. Today at the USC, Sheeri and I will conclude the South California MySQL Campus Tour. Tomorrow, April 17, big gathering at the Los Angeles MySQL Meetup Group, where Andrew Aksyonoff, Sheeri, and myself will be the speakers. Come along!

During the event, I will do a quick live demonstration of the new features included in MySQL Sandbox 3.

MySQL Campus Tour - South California

The MySQL Campus Tour got reinforcements. Dups is not alone anymore. He is being joined by Colin and Farhan. Sheeri and yours truly are in Los Angeles, just about to travel to San Luis Obispo, where we will be guests of Cal Poly. The lecture is scheduled for tomorrow, April 14th, at 11am. The address is 1 Grand Avenue, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401. Pizza will be provided! Here's a reminder of the events to come. Again, if you are in the area, come along! Attendance is free, and if you want to participate actively, you will be very welcome!

North California
13-Apr-2009	Univ. of San Francisco
15-Apr-2009	Univ. of California, Berkley
16-Apr-2009	San Jose State University
16-Apr-2009	Stanford University, Palo Alto
17-Apr-2009	Univ. of California, Davis
South California
14-Apr-2009	Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo
15-Apr-2009	UCLA, Los Angeles
15-Apr-2009	Univ. of California, Irvine
16-Apr-2009	USC, Los Angeles
17-Apr-2009	MySQL Meetup Los Angeles

Meeting MySQL community in Paris - November 18, 2008

I will meet the MySQL community in Paris on November 18, 2008 at 19:30. I will speak about MySQL Proxy Wizardry, and discuss with the community about any subject that will come up. The place: 1 rue royale, 227 Bureaux de la Colline 92210 Saint-Cloud Bâtiment D 9ème étage Tel : 01 78 15 24 00

Baltimore MySQL meetup - November 13

The Baltimore MySQL Meetup is scheduled for November 13th at 6pm The place: Lotame Solutions, Inc. 6085 Marshalee Drive Suite 210 Elkridge, MD 21075

We'll talk about MySQL Proxy, and anything else that looks suitable, depending on the crowd's requests.
Thanks to Greg Haase for organizing.

New ideas about MySQL Sandbox at the Boston meetup

Presenting a topic to a new audience is a two ways learning experience. The attendees learn what the presenter came prepared to say, and in presence of an attentive audience, the presenter can learn something on the spot. During today's Boston MySQL meetup, I got two interesting ideas aboou how to improve MySQL Sandbox.

• Using the Sandbox as a test for the future production environment is useful. But it would be even more useful if there were a simple way of transferring the contents of a well tested Sandbox to the main server, or transferring the setup of a successfully tuned replication scheme to several production servers. Currently, this can't be done easily, but I have a few ideas worth checking.


• The Sandbox can provide one or more servers for development and tests. Every server can be created by a knowledgeable administrator. It would be useful to have a sandbox provider that can create a sandbox on the spot, with an automatic check about the port being available. So the tester can simply ask for another server of a given version, and the Sandbox will be created with a non-conflicting port. There are several ways of implementing this idea. Perhaps the easiest one, suggested by an attendee, is to register the used ports.

Both these ideas are worth exploring. If you happen to care about them and have a good idea on their implementation, please contact me, or simply comment to this post. Thanks to all the ones who have brainstormed about these issues!

New York MySQL meetup - November 11

The New York MySQL Meetup is scheduled for November 11th at 6pm The place: Suspenders Restaurant 111 Broadway at Thames St New York, NY 10006 212-732-5005

We'll talk about MySQL Proxy, and anything else that looks suitable, depending on the crowd's requests.
Thanks to Philip Antoniades for the organization.

Boston MySQL meetup - November 10

The Boston MySQL meetup is held on November 10th at 7pm. The place is MIT Building E51 4 Amherst St Room 372 Cambridge, MA 02142 857 205 9786

We'll talk about MySQL Sandbox, and about any relevant MySQL topic.

On the road with Dups

Now that Dups is the Community Relations Manager for North America, we'll start working together in the most active way. Next week, we'll be busy at meetups in New York and Baltimore, and then it will be full immersion in Charlottesville for the Open SQL Camp.

Hamburg and Berlin Meetups: beer, friends, and technology

Good vibes from Hamburg and Berlin. My colleagues Barbara May, Lenz Grimmer and Jörg Brühe did an excellent job of organizing the event and beating the drum.
Both events were held at the local Sun offices, where we were received warmly with friendship, food, and beverages.
I noticed a common pattern in both places. The audience looked shy and uncooperative in the beginning, and very few questions were asked during the presentation. Shyness? Language barrier? (I was speaking in English while the other speakers were using the local language) Who knows. But things changed dramatically and for the better after the presentation, when all were ushered to the adjoining room where food and beverages were provided generously. The language barrier, if ever existed, disappeared, and questions rained from everywhere.
Perhaps serving beer before the event (like it happened in Paris) is the right path. We'll keep this in mind for the next acquisition speech. :)
Interesting news were dispatched between morsels of food, while the beer kept flowing. I learned about some juicy pieces of technological news that will be announced during the users conference by MySQL colleagues, partners, community people. I am not at liberty of disclosing any of the above (see what you missed by not coming to the meetup?) but I can tell you that some of these info are worth a trip to California.

MySQL Sandbox 1.18 - server groups and Proxy support

MySQL Sandbox 1.18 was released today. The changes log has mostly bug fixes, but also two major additions:

• The ability of creating a group of unrelated servers. Previously, there was only the set_replication.pl command, to create a set of master+slaves. Now the set_many.pl command will create unrelated servers;
• The creation of a start_proxy script with replication installations. This script starts MySQL Proxy using as backends all the servers in the group.

If you missed the previous episodes, MySQL Sandbox is a tool used to install an isolated MySQL server, independently from existing instances in the host. It can also install a replicated system of 1 master + N slaves. All the above happens in seconds.

I will be speaking about the Sandbox at the Hamburg meetup and at the MySQL Users Conference and Expo.

Working with Sun: love at first sight

I traveled with Kaj from Paris to Milan, and we went directly to the Sun offices, where we were received with great friendship and keen interest.
Franco Roman, Director of Marketing, explained to us how Sun invests on community activities, from big customers to university, to open source events.
Then we were joined by the directors of the other departments, who engaged us in lively exchanges of ideas, where we saw that our community models are different but easily complement each other.
There is much to do, but with such is the enthusiasm that is shown towards MySQL that I have little doubt we will succeed.
In the afternoon there was the meetup itself. Unlike Paris, it was held in a conference room, with a wide screen, microphones, video cameras (it will be published online. Stay tuned). Again, the participation from Sun employees and managers was really notable.
Kaj delivered his speech in Italian. The day before he spoke in French to the cheering crowd. In both cases the effort of meeting the community at direct human level was highly appreciated. Beer and food followed the technical speeches (yours truly about MySQL openness, and Stefano De Toni about Glassfish and Netbeans projects) and the crowd unwound and started engaging us in chat.
This is my second direct working experience with Sun people, and I have to say that I am impressed. I saw them at community work in Naples, where highly professional speakers delivered the goods to the expecting crowd, and I saw the impressive organizational skills at Milan event.
Kudos to Franco Roman for his vision, and to Emanuela Giannetta for making things happen!
I am really glad to be part of the Sun team.

Meetup in Paris : a MySQL social event

The Paris meetup was a very charming event. As announced, it was held in a pub, where beer was the first priority, and the audience of our (short) speeches were holding glasses and looking relaxed.
The ensuing conversations were definitely friendly and inspiring. We met mostly MySQL community, but also Sun employees and Java developers in search of cross links. Every exchange was lively, some with a touchy angle. The technical questions led to wine choices philosophy, university projects, security policies, and again to the pro and con of living in Paris as an expat. We had a merry time indeed.
Thanks to Michael, Max, Serge, and especially to Veronique, for organizing on such a short notice.

Virtual attendance to Meetup-mashup in Boston - March 10

I love this company!
MySQL is still a virtual company. The Sun acquisition hasn't change this very peculiar fact. Yesterday and the day before we have held IRC meetings between the MySQL community and some Sun open source big shots.

On Monday evening in Boston, there will be a more traditional user group meeting in Boston, host by Sheeri K. Cabral. Actually, not very much traditional. I mean, the real people will physically attend the meetup, but the whole meetup will be recorded, and you can participate via IRC. And, even better, I will make a guest appearance via video-conference.
So, please meet me in Boston on March 10, at 7 PM EST, on a cold evening, while I will talk from Sardinia, 6,400 Km (4,000 miles) apart. Thanks Sheeri for organizing this event!