Colin Charles Agenda

I’m at the Sun Tech Days Australia 2008, these few days, in Sydney, Australia. Its March 4th – 6th, and if you’d like to catch up, it looks like there are free evenings, from the agenda. At the event, I’ll be the guy donning MySQL attire, of course ;)

Expect blog posts, photos (I’ve got my pocket camera), and more soon. Don’t know if my expensive room at the Sheraton Four Points has free Internet (how much you want to bet, it doesn’t).

If you want to meet me, or catch up, don’t hesitate calling me at +61433 580 941.

Technorati Tags: sun tech days, sydney, australia

On IRC, I told Pia, that I enjoyed the Beijing SFD tremendously, and they should definitely win for 2007. I did make a note that if it was required, I would blog about it… She mentioned that it probably wouldn’t matter, because they were a contender already. Nonetheless, I figured that eventually I’d blog about it – turns out its come many months later, generally inspired by Peter Junge’s blog post. Lucky for me, all this isn’t just coming off from memory, but my trip report, that was on an internal mailing list!

First up, some quick resources: the winning report, photos, including the ones from the speaker dinner, held after the event, and the winning announcement. Granted, it was one of three events that won, but I’m happy and proud to have been associated with the Beijing event!

I had 20 minutes in total to get the message across, and there were always interesting questions that required entertaining. So my talk was entitled, Growing with MySQL. The slides themselves are pretty sparse, and I had my talk simultaneously translated (good thing I had some practice in Japan, beforehand), so all in all, I had less time to get my message across.

However, the room was full, and it was one of those amazing standing room audiences that I so always like to see. In actuality, with questions, I overran, and gave a 30 minute talk, with generally no objections from the audience (or organisers).

Attendance at the event, in total, must have been about 700-800 folk. There were 500 showbags, and they were all finished by lunchtime. I caught up with Lalo (ex-Exoweb colleague), who handed me a nice pink Software Freedom Day t-shirt. Lets just say, you’ve got to be sure of your masculinity, before putting it on :)

I fielded some interesting questions, and the usual “How come Enterprise sources aren’t available if you don’t pay? How is that freedom?” of questions, to which I always honestly inform the questioner, that you’d get it at the BitKeeper source tree, available online.

During the event, I continually did plug, a MySQL Partner in China, Great Open Source, mainly because they were my excellent hosts, and they’re the focal point for all things MySQL in Beijing. The crowd was always interested in hearing that MySQL had a Cluster Team, that worked out of the Great Open Source offices, and I also mentioned a Summer of Code 2007 student, Jin Chen, who’s Chinese in origin, but is in Canada completing her studies at the moment,

The university that hosted us? Tsinghua University. This university is apparently ranked number one in China, though there’s a continuing battle with Peking University for the coveted spot.

Now, a few things I learned:

1. OpenOffice.org has been forked, and there is a RedFlag Office now. I amused the RedFlag Office folk at the booth, when I showed them the easter egg (Help->Ctrl+SDT) which brings up the credits. They were impressed when they saw my name float by.
2. There are about five known forks of MySQL in China. They are just basically renamed to something else, and rebuilt. Seems uncouth, and I understand things are being done to fix this.
3. Mandriva and Red Flag seem to be pretty active in the Chinese market. Ubuntu is gaining great traction and momentum, thanks in large to Amy Jiang and her crew.
4. Further language assistance from MySQL needs to happen so that more Chinese can take part in the Quality Contributor Program.

The event was generally fabulous. Walking around the show floor, speaking to people, being the only English talk in the audience of entirely Chinese talks (!), spreading the good word of MySQL and open source in general, I had a fabulous time at Software Freedom Day, Beijing, 2007. I guess I was just lucky to be in Beijing at that point in time anyway (literally, a transit between Japan and Germany). I’m also extremely greatful to my hosts: Great Open Source (Claude, George, Frank, Grace), the SFD organisers and team in general, and Ken & Michael who had a dinner with me (Exoweb management folk).

Technorati Tags: floss, sfd, sfd07, beijing, software freedom day, mysql, china, openoffice.org, tsinghua university

I just registered for the MySQL Conference and Expo 2008. Note that early registration closes on February 26, 2008, so if you register now, you get a really nice discount. For what its worth, speakers were given a little discount code to give away  (20% off the conference price tag), and if you’re a blog reader, and the 20% discount will help you attend the conference, by all means drop me an email (firstname at mysql dot com).

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysql conference, mysql conference & expo 2008, santa clara, california

Via the Fedora Miniconf, I attended Del Elson’s talk on Migrating to Fedora Directory Server. Interesting scripts, and glue code was presented, the slides (verbose, good) are online, but there’s no video :(

Tiny amount of notes:
LDAP vs. DBMS

• directory has one schema, one “row” type (“object”). RDBMS has many tables
• directory => optimised for reads, slow for writes
• directory has an adaptable and mutable schema format – good for storing information about “people”

• think about the fact, that people usually have more than one phone number…

• access protocol – ldap vs. sql

Technorati Tags: ldap, dbms, fedora directory server, lca08

If you couldn’t make the MySQL MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2008, no worries – there’s recorded video!

• Upcoming MySQL Features (Stewart Smith) – focused on the future, as opposed to what’s available right now/soon
• MySQL Indexing Methods (Jonathon Coombes) AND MySQL Optimisation by Design (Arjen Lentz)– the slides are viewable from the video, and around 1 hour in, you’ll get to see a demo of Arjen’s tool, lossylogger at work. I blogged about these sessions…
• Getting started with MySQL Proxy (Giuseppe Maxia) – This goes on for a full hour, and is a most interesting talk
• MySQL Support Procedures (Trent Lloyd) – with slides written about 2 hours before the talk, Trent pulled off a great feat. There’s a little demo later of the Enterprise Monitor and Workbench (at which point the recording stopped)
• High Availability, Replicating MySQL database (Oliver Hookins) – the only talk not given by someone related to the MySQL family, and arguably, the most interesting talk (mainly because its very practical). I’d suggest watching the video! This talk was also given at the sys-admin miniconf, on the same day.
• Dealing with Hierarchical Structures (Arjen Lentz) – the slide deck is Mike Hillyer’s, the talk is interesting, and when you get about 15 minutes into the video, you’ll see Arjen talk about the GRAPH Engine that he’s been developing. There’s even some code snippets, of a new storage engine that Arjen is designing, essentially for graphing nodes
• Multi-Master MySQL Solutions (Jonathon Coombes) and a demo of Maria (Giuseppe Maxia) – pay attention to the drawings on the board for Jonathon’s talk, and if you’re fast-forwarding, go about 35 minutes into the video, to see the Maria demo.

For a full list of available miniconf talks that were recorded, check out what the LCA team has to offer. I’m surprised the LinuxChix talks never made it online (there was a really interesting memcache talk there…)!

If you download all the OGGs above, you’ll be down about 451MB. If you’re bandwidth starved, I have them on my laptop and will gladly share them on a thumb-drive.

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysql miniconf, linux.conf.au, lca08, video, storage engine

A lot of people have repeatedly asked me why I’ve not mentioned my thoughts on the Sun-MySQL acquisition (and this blog post, clearly comes almost a month later). I’ve just been pre-occupied and have not had the time to come up with a lengthy blog post. I can however, recommend the following video, created by Mike Lischke, of MySQL Workbench fame.

Naturally, you should also read the Q&A Session with Marten Mickos, that was mostly whipped up almost immediately after the acquisition. Editorial kudos on that one goes to Lenz Grimmer, Steve Curry, and Zack Urlocker. I pretty much had those thoughts that Marten answered really quickly, so I hope the Q&A is a good reflection.

But what does this all mean for me? Its too early to tell, right? Besides, I do know the Sun community quite a bit, having spent quite a few years working on OpenOffice.org (from the unofficial FAQ, to being a community marketing contact, to PowerPC and OS X porting work – heck, at the 2005 linux.conf.au, I was the Sun Regional Delegate, nationally within Australia which tacked on a great prize of going to OLS, and my first time meeting Simon Phipps), so I should be stoked, in general ;)

Thats not to say, I didn’t ask my colleague Lenz, seated next to me, if this was some kind of joke. He reassured me, it wasn’t. On internal IRC, Kaj then posted the link to his blog post Sun acquires MySQL, and at that point in time, I realised, it was all true. Monty was positive about it on internal IRC, and if its OK for Monty, it must be OK for the rest of us.

Here’s to the next chapter in MySQL’s story.

Technorati Tags: writing, mysql, sun, q&a, interview, marten mickos, video, youtube, sun meets mysql, mike lischke