Exceptional Software Explained: Embrace Error, by Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz of Asurion. One of the contenders for “best open source comedian”, r0ml delivers a humorous look at the past and future of software development models. This keynote was delivered at OSCon 2008 on Tuesday evening.

Play this 20 minute video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/577/play or download the 286 Mb file directly at http://technocation.org/node/577/download.

Brian Aker gives the “zinger” lightning talk about the newly announced “Drizzle”. This short (under 8 minutes) video captures Aker’s highlights of why he started the Drizzle project and how Drizzle is different from MySQL — both in what has been removed from MySQL and what features Drizzle can accomodate.

Play the video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/576/play or download the 116 Mb file at http://technocation.org/node/576/download.

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 Boston MySQL User Group was lucky enough to get Keith Murphy to speak at the June User Group meeting, about backups.

Direct play the video at:
http://technocation.org/node/559/play

Direct download the video (351 MB) at:
http://technocation.org/node/559/download

Links referred to in the presentation:

MyLVMBackup by Lenz Grimmer
http://lenz.homelinux.org/mylvmbackup/

InnoDB Hot Backup:
Prices are at:
http://www.innodb.com/hot-backup/order/
and at the time of this writing are:
1-Year License € 390 USD$ 605 per server
Perpetual License € 990 USD$ 1540 per server

Zmanda
prices are at: http://network.zmanda.com/shop/home.php?cat=1,3
Current prices are between the range of $100-$450, and a license is needed for each server and each client. So if you have 1 server and 3 clients, you need 4 licenses.

Online Backup
This is interesting reading about online backup, an article about how the online backup works at: http://blogs.mysql.com/peterg/2008/05/19/mysql-60-feature-2-online-backup/

This page (at the bottom, under “Replication”) states that the desired behavior is that the binary log does not log the restore or the backup. However, it does state that this is not implemented yet, nor even decided upon.

There’s also a great page on Online Backup at the MySQL Forge: http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/OnlineBackup

And if you’re short on time, the manual has a short page at http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/
duplicity: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

It was mentioned that some people use a code repository to backup their database: http://krow.livejournal.com/593424.html

I have already blogged about this keynote at http://www.pythian.com/blogs/948/liveblogging-who-is-the-dick-on-my-site.

If you are interested in actually seeing the video, the 286 Mb .wmv file can be downloaded at http://technocation.org/videos/original/mysqlconf2008/2008_04_17_panelDick.wmv and played through your browser by clicking the “play” link at http://tinyurl.com/55c5ps. This is not to be missed!

Yesterday’s keynote panel on “Scaling MySQL — Up or Out?”

Directly download the 310MB wmv file (not if you are on the conference wireless please!), or watch it in your browser via streaming — simply click the “play” link on this page.

Keith Murphy managed to take painstaking notes with all the facts and figures. As well, Venu Anuganti presents a chart with the results as well as notes on the more detailed answers. Ronald Bradford has a brief summary of the 20 seconds of wisdom from each panelist.

Jonathan Schwartz’s Keynote at the 2008 MySQL Conference can be played directly in your browser or you can download the 147MB .wmv file. (Please do not download the movie on the conference wireless system!)

I finally realized who Jonathan Schwartz reminds me of:

That’s right, comedian and magician Penn Jillette.

Schwartz started by saying, “enough of this free software stuff!” It got lots of laughs. He started to talk about Sun’s agenda, and mentioned that MySQL and Sun had similar values, as well as similar dysfunctions as well — particularly that each engineer has his/her own opinion.

But Schwartz goes on in earnest to say “The future will be defined by free….and freedom,” that “freedom is a price tag *and* a philosophy.” I agree completely.

He sees “the network is a social utility” much like heat and electricity are utilities. His talk somewhat reminded me of the Free as in Water post I made in June 2007.

He finished up by comparing the Amazon River to Sun — The Amazon River is really ecosystem of many rivers — 10,000 smaller rivers. Sun is really an ecosystem of many communities — Java, Open Office, Solaris, Open Solaris, MySQL, and so on. I was very pleased to hear that he feels that community is not only inclusive of all users, paid or otherwise, but that the ecosystem cannot exist without each part of that “smaller river” contributing to the whole. And *that* is Sun’s agenda, to continue to build that river, so if one part has problems, the entire river is not damaged.

Also, Sun has a quote that “innovation happens elsewhere,” so it is crucial to build those bridges (mixed metaphor unintended) so that Sun can support and enable the innovation. In a world where diversity is key, this is an excellent message.

Bravo, Jonathan!