Sun CEC 2008: MySQL Sessions the buzz of the conference

There were a lot of great stories and sessions at the Sun CEC 2008 conference. The MySQL sessions were some of the most popular sessions of the conference. My focus was on delivering sessions that would teach Sun engineers and partners why MySQL is exploding in the market place. Additional sessions developed specific MySQL DBA skills for Sun engineers. More details can be found at:

http://blogs.sun.com/GeorgeTrujillo/entry/sun_cec_2008_in_las

Thanks to all the attendees and their great efforts during the hands on lab sessions.

Marten Mickos at Sun CEC 2008: MySQL Sessions

During the Sun CEC 2008 MySQL sessions training track it was great to get Marten Mickos to speak to the Sun audience. As I was lining up guest speakers for my MySQL sessions I really wanted to get Marten there to address questions Sun employees have on the MySQL acquisition and to discuss future directions of MySQL with Sun. Marten as one of the key leaders in open source as always did a great job of positioning MySQL within Sun for the Sun employees and partners.

Highlights I picked up from the presentation:

• MySQL has a very large and constantly growing community embracing open source and MySQL. With over 70,000 downloads a day, MySQL continues to increase its user base and popularity. This popularity opens up more and more opportunities for MySQL Enterprise licenses and Sun products.
  
• MySQL Enterprise licenses are a lot easier to understand and at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions.
• MySQL's objective is to be "fast", "reliable" and "easy to use" versus trying to be feature crazy.
• MySQL is not trying to compete directly against Oracle in the large Oracle OLTP environments. MySQL excels in web environments for very fast read performance is critical.
  
• How MySQL generates revenue today and how revenue will continue to grow as a Sun product.
• Where MySQL is today and where it is going.

Thanks Marten for the great job of showing Sun employees and partners the direction and future of MySQL.

Sun CEC 2008: November 10, 2008

This morning started with a nice breakfast and the opening general session. Key speakers include:

• Daniel J. Berg - CTO Global Sales and Services and VP of EM Systems Engineering
• Peter Ryan - Execute VP Global Sales and Services
• Jonathan Schwartz - CEO and President
• Hal Stern - Senior VP Systems Engineering

Highlights from the General Session

Open source is disruptive technology. Open source is putting pressure on proprietary companies.

Sun is almost a cult versus just a company. Today, Sun has a great story with open source. Customers can achieve tremendous savings by using Sun open source solutions.

Monetization of MySQL acquisition
Very important for Sun to be able to sell out of their traditional base. MySQL opens tremendous new opportunities for Sun. From Eric Schmidt (CEO at Google), "When you look at Google, our products are our ads". At Sun, storage, ZFS, Java, MySQL and their incredible popularity are ads for Sun. An extremely large customer said the proprietary vendors are absolutely killing their IT budget, so they are moving to MySQL to change their history of paying unbelievable amounts of money to proprietary vendors. MySQL is constantly proving their ability to disrupt the industry by saving customers large amounts of money.

Takeaway messages from Jonathan:

• "Please have fun when you come to work."
• "Be active with customers about our products."
• "Now is the time to be talking to customers about what Sun is doing."

Quote: "At Sun, We are innovators, we create the future. At Sun we are not bigger than our competitors, but we are smarter. Our flexibility and agility is a key. Our technicalese is our strength."

Sun does not have the resources and funds to do the massive marketing like IBM and HP. However, the large number of leads from MySQL and turning these leads into sales is a great opportunity for Sun. Part of Sun's future success is due to customers looking at Sun for innovation.

The Platform is a Service

Even in a down economy, there is growth. Cloud computing is one of those areas. Refactoring of applications, horizontal scaling, server consolidation, Web 2.0, SAAS, etc. are all key focus areas for customers. End users are becoming the developer. Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, Google analytics are generating a new level of data generation. Today there are 280 exabytes of data approximately with 10 times grown in next three years. One zetabyte will be added in next few years. Managing extremely large amounts of data is becoming a serious challenge for customers.

The Platform is a Service

Packaging this development environment is important. The platform is a service. Platform services are now being provided by large companies. Infrastructure and platforms are important services. Virtualization is a key for both of these. Virtualization will create new services.

Tuning MySQL, leveraging MySQL, LAMP, SAMP with Sun technology is important. Semi-structured data is exploding. We are moving to a new class of systems. High speed networking with large network storage is very important to customers. Sun's Open Storage solutions are going to change how the industry does business and how it transforms customers business. A simple Web 2.0 model, analytics, with extremely large data growth is a key for customers. "Join the Web 3.0 model". "Embrace the Could, make it real". Cloud computing is the future. Social networks are changing how companies manage their data. Four important areas:

• Systems
• Microelectronics
• Software and Services
• Cloud computing

The evolution of Second Life with Sun and customers is growing. Security around the server, the cloud and Second Life is a challenge for customers.

Sun's ipod?

One of the biggest frustrations of Sun employees is they feel that Sun does not put enough effort in marketing products. There was a lot of discussion on Sun's pespective on how to market Sun products and the role of marketing. When I was at Oracle World, one leading industry analyst told me "Sun's problem is they have great innovation no one knows about and they don't leverage".

What is Sun's ipod? Sun is not a consumer device company. The ipod is a great user device. It's changed how people listen to music. Matchbox, for a dollar allowed kids to have a great imagination experience. The book "Peak Performers" was mentioned. Sun needs to participate in the community to make customers understand how to leverage technology. This is the challenge for Sun.

"Knowledge is a. rare thing -- you. gain by giving it"

Sun needs to show customers how things should be done. Systems engineering and delivery needs to show best practices to customers. Ivan Sutherland and his love of technology was discussed. Ivan has one of my favoriate quotes, "Knowledge is a. rare thing -- you. gain by giving it". Charles Garfield, "People how do something are people that know what do do next". In this tuburlent environment, Sun need's to show customers what to do next.

From Hal Stern, "if you have a great idea, be aggressive, implement it." "Figure out what needs to be done and just go do it". "Courage is what it takes to overcome fear. Fear is perceived risk". "Share your ideas, take your ideas to the market". "It takes courage to challenge the market".

The following areas have been constantly highlighted: open source, networking virtualization and storage.

Second Life rocks at Sun CEC 2008

Second life is playing a key role at the Sun CEC. Keynotes, general sessions and great presentions are all occurring in second life. Second life is giving remote attendees a great live experience of the conference.

Hal Stern will come inworld at 1pm PT today, and 5:30pm PT with his avatar with a pressentation and slides specifically for the virtual audience. Here is the wiki
https://cetwo.sfbay.sun.com/display/VIRTUALWORLDS/CEC+2008+in+Second+Life

The Sun 2008 Customer Engineering Conference

I'm definitely looking forward to presenting the MySQL sessions here at the Sun 2008 Customer Engineering Conference (CEC). The conference is at the Paris Hotel here in Las Vegas. The conference starts for me today (Sunday, November 9) with a walk through from 5:00-6:30pm. All the training track managers need to go through the walkthrough. The welcome reception is then at the Paris, Pavilion/Hang Space from 6:00-8:00pm. I am definitely looking forward to the conference getting started.

Complements to Paul Gehring and his team. I think they did an excellent job with the walk throughs for the track managers. Well executed planning and organization meeting for conference.

The welcome reception was a lot of fun. Food was awesome and environment was very festive. Also got some cool chotski at the event. Kudos to Sun and vendors, getting cool chotski was appreciated at the open reception. Yes we do love da chotski!

Loved the new computer bag received for the conference. It's a real high quality bag, and since my old Sun laptop bag broke two weeks ago the timing was perfect. Appreciated getting the nice high quality bag instead of the cheap ones you sometimes get at some conferences.

The hotel rooms in the Paris hotel are fantastic.

Ty Valdez and George Trujillo presenting at Sun CEC in Las Vegas

Ty Valdez and George Trujillo will be delivering multiple training sessions on the MySQL database server at the Sun Customer Engineering Conference (CEC) in Las Vegas during the week of November 9th - 14th, 2008. Details of the presentations can be found at http://blogs.sun.com/georgetrujillo. Key areas of presentation include:

• Positioning MySQL and MySQL database installation
• Understanding the MySQL architecture
• Storage engines and table/index management
• Client programs and MySQL Administrator
• Starting, stopping and configuring the MySQL Server
• Information_schema, administration logs and diagnostics
• Locking and transactions
• User management and security
• Optimizing queries, database and the server
• Character set support, scaling and miscellaneous
• Backup and recovery