I had the pleasure of addressing a crowd of over 1,000+ people yesterday, at the Sun Tech Days event in Hyderabad. I think this might as well be the biggest number of attendees at a talk that I’ve given. I spoke on MySQL: The Database for Web 2.0, and the notes for this talk are largely indexed at MySQL for Developers. Its more or less the standard deck for the Tech Days events these days.
The best part? The questions. I had intelligent questions, and they lasted well over twenty minutes, and there was even more chatter afterwards. Twenty minutes might not seem like a lot, but this is Asia, and in some audiences, you’d be hard pressed to get even a single question! MySQL is hot, in India. Really, really, hot.
I’m glad to see that most people are using MySQL 5 and 5.1. I’m not so glad to see that most people don’t know about storage engines – most are using MyISAM without even knowing it, and they don’t know there exist other engines. This is what I notice, every time I talk about storage engines, though. For the astute MySQL developer, the DevZone is known (thanks to the documentation, mainly), but the Forge is almost unheard of. Planet MySQL seems to be more popular, actually.
Arun Gupta has some nice pictures and videos of the event in general. For me, I was jet-lagged after a massive delay in my flight leaving Kuala Lumpur (plane was unserviceable), and I only mustered under three hours of sleep before addressing the large crowd of folk.
The Tech Days events for the (financial) year are winding down, and for the next (financial) year, we (MySQL/The Database Group, in general) need to plan to be first class citizens at the event. Not only in terms of talks, but we need booth space (we’re about the only Sun project lacking a booth). After all, we have interesting things to talk about: MySQL, Drizzle, MySQL Enterprise Tools/Merlin, Workbench, Proxy, Query Analyser/Quan, Cluster, Replication, DTrace, Virtualisation and the database (VirtualBox? xVM?), etc. This list is probably never ending, so some cool demos, lots of fact sheets, maybe even USB sticks of goodies (2GB sticks are dirt cheap, and loading it up with information not only make people want to get a stick, but makes them learn more – hopefully before they format it! :P).