At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, Ronald Bradford delivered "The Top 20 Design Tips for Enterprise Data Architects". See the slides on the Forge at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008ThursdayNotes#Top_20_DB_Design_Tips_Every_Architect_Needs_to_Know

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, the closing keynote was Jacek Becla speaking on "The Science and Fiction of Petascale Analysis". See the slides on the Forge at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008ThursdayNotes#The_Science_and_Fiction_of_Petascale_Analytics

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, there was a panel discussion on "Addressing Challenges of Data Warehousing - a Panel Discussion" including:

Robin Schumacher (Sun/MySQL) (moderator)

Brian Miezejewski (MySQL), Charles Hooper (Pro Relational Systems), Paul Whittington (NitroSecurity, Inc.), Raj Cherabuddi (Kickfire), Victoria Eastwood (InfoBright Inc.)

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Lenz Grimmer spoke about "Performing MySQL Backups Using LVM Snapshots". Download the slides, see people's notes, and more on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008WednesdayNotes#Performing_MySQL_Backups_Using_LVM_Snapshots

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Farhan Mashraqi spoke about "Optimizing MySQL and InnoDB on Solaris 10 for World's Largest Photo Blogging Community". Download the slides, see people's notes, and more on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008ThursdayNotes#Optimizing_MySQL_and_InnoDB_on_Solaris_10_for_World.27s_Largest_Photo_Blogging_Community

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Eric Herman and Antony Curtis spoke about "External Language Stored Procedures". Download the slides, see people's notes, and more on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008ThursdayNotes#External_Language_Stored_Procedures

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Ann Harrison and Kevin Lewis spoke about "Falcon for Innodb Users". Download the slides, see people's notes, and more on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008WednesdayNotes#Falcon_for_InnoDB_Users

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Baron Schwartz spoke on "The MySQL Query Cache". Download the slides, see people's notes, and more on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008WednesdayNotes#The_MySQL_Query_Cache

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Monty Widenius spoke on "Architecture of Maria: A New Storage Engine with a Transactional Design ". Download the slides, see people's notes, and more on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008WednesdayNotes#Architecture_of_Maria:_A_New_Storage_Engine_with_a_Transactional_Design

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Phil Hildebrand spoke on "Applied Partitioning and Scaling Your Database System". Download the slides, see people's notes, and more on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008WednesdayNotes#Applied_Partitioning_and_Scaling_Your_Database_System.

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Robert Hodges spoke on "Portable Scale-out Benchmarks for MySQL". Download slides and see links to blog postings at the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008WednesdayNotes#Portable_Scale-out_Benchmarks_for_MySQL

Hello, Sun!

I am one of the 400 employees who, on January 16, 2008, awoke at the thundering words of Marten Mickos and Jonathan Schwartz, announcing that MySQL had been acquired by Sun for $1b. Theoretically, or arithmetically, I should be worth $2.5m, and so handle with care. :)

Who am I?

I am a database enthusiast, with a reputation in several open source places. I am known in the Perl and MySQL communities, and you may have seen me around during some conferences, talking about unusual hacks or making jokes in heavily accented English.

I have another, historical blog, actually, with the same name, The Data Charmer, which has become my middle name.

My current job is MySQL Community Team Lead, but until January 2008 I was a QA Developer with community links. The jump did not happen by chance. Community and QA are strictly related. I am an open source enthusiast because of the quality of my favorite open source products. It's my job to broaden the MySQL community by showing what I do, not by trumpeting announcements. When I recommend something, it's because I have tried it out, and it worked for me.

I love experimenting, and I often come up with unusual ideas to bend the stiff applications to more flexible needs. Someone calls this approach creative programming, someone prefers the term hacking. The bottom line is that I stretch my favorite tools to the limits, and I get results that, to the untrained eye, look like magic. I usually don't contradict the believers, unless they ask for the manual page where the trick is explained. Then I have to admit that most of what I did is an harmonious combination of simple elements that were initially designed for some other purpose.

Before joining MySQL, I was "in the family" for several years. I was working as a database consultant and I contributed to the community from outside. Now, I do the same from the inside. Growing the community is my task, and I have three dedicated fellows in my team, who share the burden of managing a worldwide community spread across all continents.

• Colin Charles (APAC)
• Lenz Grimmer (EMEA)
• Jay Pipes (North America)

Europe has the lion share, since I and my boss, Kaj Arnö, live in that continent. The astute reader will have noticed that there is nobody covering Latin America and Africa, and also Russia is largely neglected. We know it. We are making plans.

For now, that was an introduction. Hello, Sun, here we come! More on MySQL in my next posts.

The video of one of my three sessions, "Optimizing MySQL and InnoDB on Solaris 10 for World's Largest Photo Blogging Community", presented at MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 has been uploaded by Sheeri. I am very thankful to her for doing all the hard work and making it available.

There are a few slides that were edited out of video because of reasons beyond my control. However, you should still be able to enjoy most of the video.

There is one point related to this video that I would like to make: Based on my particular experience I was leading to believe that Solaris 10 Kernel had the same issue as Linux Kernel related to swappiness and swapping where the kernel will start putting more importance on maintaining file system cache than the mysqld process. However, towards the end of the session, it was pointed out by a Sun engineer (thanks!) that there must be something else going on as UFS on Solaris 10 shouldn't depict this behavior and a process shouldn't swap in favor of maintaining file system cache. I am having this issue on 3 of my servers and I am currently working with Sun engineers to get to the bottom of the issue.

I just made my reservations to attend Velocity Conference in Burlingame, CA. Velocity is a new two day conference being organized by O'Reilly. I was happy to learn at Lunch today that one of my good friends from CafeMom will also be attending. Over at Facebook I see Don McAskill has RSVP'd for the event as well.

Jesse Robbins, chair for Velocity conference graciously provided a 20% discount coupon as a comment on my blog post.

The early registration is about to end, but I find it really interesting that many slots still mention TBC (to be confirmed). I would have expected the schedule to be fully determined by now, however, I still believe this should be a great conference to attend.

Earlier I wrote about my proposed session being rejected at Velocity Conference which was a big disappointment especially since my presentation was about a top 13 website in the world. Wasn't that the point of this conference to begin with? There are several sessions at this conference that have been presented several times at other conferences including MySQL and a little Google search turns up the slides. So some company's 'secret sauce' is worth repeating and others not? Oh well, no hard feelings. As I said, I still think there would be some interesting sessions.

Let me know if you are planning to attend the conference. I will be flying to SFO on Sunday evening and flying back on Wednesday afternoon.

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party delivered a keynote on "Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties".

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party delivered a keynote on "Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties".

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Brian Miezejewski gave a workshop on "Securing MySQL for a Security Audit".

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Domas Mituzas gave a workshop on "Practical MySQL for Web Applications".

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Sebastian Bergmann presented "Video: Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit". See all the blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008TuesdayNotes#Testing_PHP.2FMySQL_Applications_with_PHPUnit.2FDbUnit.

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Werner Vogels of Amazon.com delivered a keynote called "A Head in the Cloud -- The Power of Infrastructure as a Service". See all the blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008TuesdayNotes#A_Head_in_the_Cloud_-_The_Power_of_Infrastructure_as_a_Service.