Pythian Group

Giuseppe Maxia and I are in the exact middle of our leg of theMySQL Campus Tour. Yesterday’s session was recorded:

A PDF of the slides can be downloaded at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Tour.pdf (21 Mb).

Click on the thumbnails for larger pictures of the standing-room only crowd, and lunch with the great folks at Cal Poly afterwards:

Links referred to in the presentation, or related to the presentation:
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As folks are making their plans to go to the MySQL User Conference, I just wanted to remind folks of the schedule of MySQL Camp.

One feature I put together for MySQL Camp but anyone can use is a restaurant list for the hotel area. There’s very little within walking distance, but many people will be local or will rent a car, so finding someone to drive with should not be a problem. The restaurant list is on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/SantaClaraRestaurants — updates are welcome!

About MySQL Camp: MySQL Camp is completely free, just walk on in and enjoy the sessions. All sessions are in the Bayshore room off the Mezzanine, and there will be signs directing you to the MySQL Camp room. I describe it as being like “an additional room for the MySQL Conference, but it’s free.” It also has some of the more technical, hands-on talks that did not make it to the conference.
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As many of us know, the 5th annual MySQL Conference and Expo is happening April 20-23rd, 2009 in Santa Clara, California. The theme is Innovation Everywhere, and this year the conference organizers have taken an innovative page from OSCon and decided to host a free “camp” during the conference.

As far as I know, MySQL Camp is the only free, non-commercial programming occurring. We already have a fantastic lineup of speakers and last week I was surprised with another bounty — MySQL Camp has been extended to Thursday!

While you are making your travel and lodging arrangements, remember that on Sunday April 19th on the mezzanine of the conference hotel there will be a Games Day from 12 noon – 12 midnight. Stop by, play a game (bring your own if you want), or just watch. Find a dinner buddy, meet up with old friends or just start meeting new people before the conference starts on Monday. If you want to find me, I will be the one who’s trying to knit and play a game at the same time.

The speakers and MySQL Camp sessions are listed at Read the rest of this entry . . .

Yesterday I announced the MySQL Unconference. Some folks have asked about the MySQL Camp that both Giuseppe and I previously announced.

They are one and the same. In order to minimize confusion, I’ll change things to say “MySQL Camp” instead of “Unconference”. Apologies to those who were confused!

I am happy and pleased to announce the 2009 MySQL Camp. MySQL Camp is a free conference that gives the community a chance to participate without having to incur the large expense of the official conference. Community members old and new will be on hand to speak, answer questions, give advice and generally help out. It will be taking place at the same time and place as the MySQL Conference and Expo — (well, almost the same time).

The grand scale details:
Sunday, April 19 2009 – Wed. April 22 2009 (the MySQL conference goes until Thursday)

The Hyatt Regency Santa Clara
5101 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara, CA 95054
USA

Phone: (408) 200-1234
Fax: (408) 980-3990

MySQL Camp will be held in the Bayshore room (on the hotel mezzanine).

When you make your travel plans, keep in mind that MySQL Camp starts with an informal games day on Sunday (see below for details). Travel information can be found on the MySQL Conference and Expo site at http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2009/public/content/hotel.

Currently registration is free, there is no registration process, and we are working out breakfast and lunch arrangements. These details may change (there may be a nominal fee for food, getting a pass to the Expo hall may require free registration, etc), so stay tuned for further details!

Scheduled sessions for MySQL Camp can be seen at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Conference_and_Expo_2009. There are many unscheduled sessions at this point, which are listed below.

On Sunday, April 19, 2009 from 12 noon until 12 midnight on the hotel mezzanine we will be having a game day. Play a game or just watch, and please bring your favorite game! People will drop in and out all day, so finding new and old friends to have dinner with will not be an issue. See the game day website to look at the list of games and add any you want to see or know you can bring.

On Monday, April 20, 2009 from 8:30 am – 12 noon a hackfest will take place. Mark Callaghan of Google will lead folks through choosing a feature to add to MySQL, teach the important details about how to hack MySQL, and then much hacking will happen!

From 1:30 pm – 5 pm we will feature an “Ask the Guru” session, where leading MySQL experts will be on hand to answer your questions. Ask something broad or specific, about theory or an actual use case. Want someone to look over a database schema? Optimize a query? Want to know why a certain error is occurring? Bring your questions, or just come to listen.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, April 21-22, 2009 from 10:50 am until 6 pm there will be 6 sessions per day, at the same time as the MySQL Conference sessions. Unfortunately, during the keynote time slots on both days MySQL Camp will be closed. However, MySQL Camp attendees will be able to visit the Expo hall on Wednesday, to visit booths, get swag, etc.

Note that the MySQL Camp sessions are not fully scheduled — there are plenty of sessions that are TBD, so that folks can sign up to speak on a topic at the conference. If you have an idea, feel free to e-mail awfief@gmail.com with your idea(s) and the time(s) you would like to present. This is not required; you can use the wiki to “sign up” for a time slot. However, I can help make sure that there are no similar conference talks at the same time, and help you refine your topic so it’s not too much for a 45-minute session.

Currently the following workshops are in the process of being scheduled for MySQL Camp:

Roland Bouman (XCDSQL Solutions / Strukton Rail, blog and blurb and Conference sessions) will be doing one workshop on “MySQL Plugins” and another on “MySQL UDF’s” (what they are, how to create them, etc).

Ronald Bradford (42SQL, website and blog and blurb and Conference sessions) will give a session on “Setting up MySQL on Amazon Web Services” (aka, AWS, using EC2). This session will take place at 3:05 pm on Tuesday, April 21st.

Leslie Hawthorn (Google, blog) will give a session on “Open Source for Newbies” (some time on Wed).

Christos Kalanzis (profile) will give a session on “How to run 2 instances of Mysql on the same machine using one set of binaries” at 3:05 pm on Wednesday.

Stewart Smith (Sun/MySQL, blog and Blurb and Conference sessions) will give a session on how different filesystems interact with MySQL.

Morgan Tocker (blog, Blurb and Conference sessions) – “Chasing Bottlenecks” — for beginner and intermediate DBAs. From Morgan: The best way to performance tune a system is to find out what your bottlenecks are, and attacking those first. In the first part of this session, I’ll be looking at some of the issues faced with common database workloads. From there, I’ll then be showing how you can get more information out of MySQL and your Operating System to find out about your workload.

Other topics that will happen, speakers TBD:
Drizzle
MySQL Cluster
Using bzr for source control

There will be a closing keynote at 5:15 pm on Wednesday, speaker TBD.

OpenSQL Camp is a free unconference happening Friday, Nov. 14th through Sunday, Nov. 16th in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. More details can be found at http://www.opensqlcamp.org.

Whether or not you have already registered for OpenSQL Camp by putting your name here:

http://www.opensqlcamp.org/index.php?title=Events/2008/AttendeeList

you should be aware of very important information.
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