Sun Employees Connect Party

An excellent ending to a great educational day. The party was outstanding. I didn't realize I had so many dance moves left in me. Thanks to the people that showed me some cool dance moves that made me look good.

In previous times, people discounted the telephone, automobile and Internet as being toys and play things for people with too much idle time. The same people that laugh at how short sighted people were in the past to new technologies, are the same people that laugh at some of today's emerging technologies. Today's event brought together a lot of people that understand there are new and emerging communication vehicles that are changing the way people interact and will work in the future.

Today reminded me not only does the world not stand still, its accelerating. I've been to a lot of outstanding conferences in the last year such as Oracle Open World, Collaborate 2008 and the MySQL Users Conference where I met a lot of outstanding people and exchanged a lot of ideas. Today's Sun Employees Connect reminded me how fast things change and I'd better maintain the eye of the tiger to stay on the leading edge. I can think easily of ten conferences I would like to attend before the year is over. Java One, ODTUG, BEA and a few gaming conferences are at the top of my list.

Whew, what a long and fruitful day ...

Sun Employees Connect: An excellent day at Sun

I really enjoyed the Sun Employees Connect event. Sun executives such as Jonathan Schwartz, Martin Mickos, Rich Green, Don Grantham, John Fowler, Karie Willyerd, Hal Stern, Lin Lee shared ideas, perspective and direction for the organization. Sun's innovativeness and strategic directions make it a lot of fun to go to work everyday. I really felt a lot of the same closeness and willingness to share with the employees that I felt about the MySQL culture. I personally was really motivated to get more involved in Sun activities in and out of work after hearing all the speakers.

The work of Fiona's team and all the volunteers made for a great event. Their outstanding efforts were greatly appreciated. Everything was an incredible amount of fun and a very unique educational opportunity. The things I learned today, the networking connections I made and the realization of emerging technologies made it a unique learning experience. I spent way to much time in the building workshops but they were a lot of fun. I wanted to go to Racers Island and race cars but I had too much fun building things. Thanks Whoops!

Hats off to everyone for putting on such a great event!

MySQL Users Conference 2008

My wrap up on the MySQL Users Conference 2008:

• All the rooms were filled for almost all presentations.
• Any presentations on Falcon, new InnoDB plug in and Maria were packed. The race is on! Falcon drew first blood by being available in the MySQL 6.0 release but the new features in InnoDB look very good.
• Performance tuning presentations were SRO.
• I found all the presentations on the query cache, Innodb, and Myisam to be excellent. They all had little tidbits and recommendations that were very useful.
• I was very impressed that all of my students I seen at the conference were very happy about their MySQL projects.
• Birds of the Feather were the best BOFs I've ever seen put on at a conference.
• Great diversity in the presentation topics.
  

Takeaway thoughts after the conference:

• Like all database server environments tuning is a high priority for everyone.
• Data warehousing in MySQL is gaining strong momentum.
• Customers are using MySQL in ways I never imagined.
• Lots of enthusiasm for MySQL at the conference.
  
• I would not be surprised to see the size of the conference double for next year.
• I thought the conference had a high ROI for attendees.

MySQL Users Conference - Wednesday

Today there are a lot of presentations that stand out. They include:

• Roland Bouman - Information_schema presenations.
• Tobias Asplund and Jay Pipes - MySQL Performance.
• Tom Hanlon - Benchmarking and Monitoring.
• Balint - Deadlocks, Wait Timeouts and Other Transactional Issues.
• Grimmer - MySQL Backups using LVM Snapshots.

MySQL Users Conference

It's great seeing all the excitement and enthusiasm at the MySQL conference. From my perspective some of the key highlights from the first two days include:
Monday - Memcache - A big hit with a lot of interest.
Tuesday: Top Highlights
Mårten and Jonathan's keynotes.
New features in InnoDB - Ken Jacobs showed a number of new features in the new alpha release of InnoDB that really stood out. It's a plug in that needs to be installed in a 5.1.23 or greater release of MySQL. Rebuilding of indexes and performance enhancements definitely will make it worthwhile to look at these features in more detail.

• Fast index creation without copying data.
• Data compression.
• New INFORMATION_SCHMEMA objects for compression and locking.
• New row format to support long BLOB, TEXT and VARCHAR columns out of line.
• TRUNCATE TABLE recreates the .ibd file.
• More dynamic features with innodb_file_per_table.
• INNODB strict mode.
  

There were also some excellent presentations on replication and performance. The technical birds of a feather presentations were also very cool.

The competition between InnoDB, Falcon and Maria has definitely stepped up. This competition will be a big win for the user community.

MySQL Users Conference 2008 - Getting Ready

The MySQL Users Conference is just about to start. With MySQL now part of Sun, it is infusing a lot of energy and enthusiasm into MySQL and the conference. This is shaping up to be the best MySQL conference ever. If this is your first conference, here are my top 10 things I recommend you do to get ready for the conference:

1) Solidify your personal schedule and set backups in case a room is full for a presentation.

2) Plan on spending time in the vendor booth area, plan to ask experts some good questions. Leverage your time there.

3) What is your networking game plan? One of the key benefits is to network at the conference. What are some good things to ask other people while you are there. Try to meet as many people as you can.

4) Look at all the breakfast and evening events. Plan ahead for activities.

5) Have your business cards and other information ready.

6) Maximize attending presentations: Download presentations in advance so you can ask more detailed questions during the presentation. Make sure you check the daily agenda updates. There are always cool things added at the conference.

7) Meet instructors that are part of the MySQL education team. A very cooool group! Tobias, Glynn, Sarah, Kai, Morgan, David, Steve, Max and Tom. You all rock!

8) Read some conference blogs to make sure you are in the loop at the conference.

9) There are some very hot topic areas. Some of them include:

• Memcache
• DBRD and Heartbeat
  
• Falcon and Maria
• Enhancements to InnoDB
• Learning internals
• All the software available for MySQL The hot area seems to be data warehousing.
  

10) Introduce yourself to peers, presenters and conference volunteers. They all want to make sure you have a great time.

One more for good luck: Bring an extra bag or suitcase to bring additional things back from the vendor booths, etc.
See you there!