The highlight of the meeting was an interesting presentation on security by the founder of OVSAGE, Scott Murphy. The focus was on the fact that security is a mindset, not a product. Scott’s presentation looked at a large number of security issues and explained in detail while technology alone cannot fix security issues. The presentation was a response to the Amrit Williams Blog post Top 10 Reasons Your Security Program Sucks and Why You Can’t Do Anything About It.
Scott’s presentation can be viewed here: security-quagmire-pdf. I hope you find it useful.
Last month at the Boston MySQL User Group, I went through the meanings of INNER, LEFT/RIGHT OUTER, CROSS, NATURAL joins, how to do a FULL OUTER JOIN in MySQL, and what STRAIGHT_JOIN means. I also explained how to recognize when you want those types of joins, and best practices for the semantics of writing joins and design patterns. Subqueries were explained in this session, and some examples of how to think differently so that you end up writing JOINs instead of subqueries. The slides (slightly different from the slides in the video — due to error correction) can be found at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2010_01MySQLJoins.pdf.
This blog post will briefly explain the how each part of the proposal is used, then have a list of what not to do in your conference proposal, and end with a checklist of questions to go over your proposal before submitting. Click here if you want to skip to the checklist.
At the March Boston MySQL User Group meeting, Jacob Nikom of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory presented “Optimizing Concurrent Storage and Retrieval Operations for Real-Time Surveillance Applications.” In the middle of the talk, Jacob said he sometimes calls what he did in this application as “real-time data warehousing”, which was so accurate I decided to give that title to this blog post.
Brian Aker delivers the keynote speech at OpenSQL Camp: State of the Open Source Databases. The presentation begins with a disclaimer: “There is no way I’m going to tell you exactly where the future of databases go. We have way too many egos in the room to ever even begin a discussion…”
and ends with Aker saying, “What the hell does that mean?”
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.
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.