Colin Charles Agenda

As is tradition after the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo, there tends to be a storage engine summit right afterwards. This year it was expanded to also include plugins. I must graciously thank Facebook for hosting us at their campus, and giving us a rather healthy lunch, plus fueling us with all those drinks, caffeine and snacks that we needed to keep us going. While standing in the doorway, Mark (Callaghan) pointed to us that a certain other Mark (Zuckerberg) was walking into the campus, just like the rest of us.

The very raw notes are up on the Knowledgebase – Plugins & Storage Engines Summit for MySQL/MariaDB/Drizzle 2011. We definitely did not discuss anything Drizzle related, and we barely had time to focus on plugins, so the focus was still very much storage engines. There was representation from storage engine vendors: Tokutek (TokuDB), PrimeBase (PBXT/PBMS), ScaleDB, Sphinx (SphinxSE), Brazil Inc (groonga), WildGrowth (Spider), Infobright, Percona (XtraDB). Beyond the engines, there were people also representing Facebook, Wikipedia, Mail.ru, and Monty Program.

There’s a bunch of things TODO, and its probably worth commenting in the Knowledgebase if there are things that interest you. I guess next week there will be Worklog entries, mailing list posts, and connecting with folk to make sure the momentum continues on.

If you’ve been busy and haven’t registered yet, remember that early-bird pricing ends on 31/03/2011. From April 1-10, you’ll have to pay USD$100 more. A discount code for use (I think you save 20-25%): mys11fsd.

We’re full up in terms of the schedule. People are still asking for an opportunity to speak, and there are still opportunities in the Products & Services track. Please contact Yvonne Romaine at yromaine@oreilly.com for more information on this.

Might I also suggest that if you want to speak and there’s no longer an opportunity, you submit a five-minute talk for the Ignite MySQL event. Even though submissions are now closed, contact Brian Aker — he’ll try and help make some magic happen for you.

Don’t forget you can also lead a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session. While it is not a talk, you can still gather like-minded folk and talk about things over pizza & beer (which has always been a popular combination in previous years).

If you’re looking for a new job, don’t forget the Career Zone. There are some great companies participating, so that’s another good reason to come.

Conferences are all about networking. While not enabled by default, I suggest you manually go and turn on access to the Attendee Directory, so you can write messages to people you want to meet, have chats with, and so on.

Its that time of year again. The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011 happening April 11-14 2011, in Santa Clara, California. As co-chair this year with Brian Aker, I’m pretty excited at the content available. It is certainly more diverse and if you thought you knew everything about MySQL, remember you also want to learn about the ecosystem surrounding it.

No one just deploys MySQL standalone these days. There’s an ecosystem. Heck, even in the MySQL world, there is an ecosystem building out. Look at the schedule grid, and see how diverse things are. Yes, there are talks on CouchDB, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Eucalyptus, OpenStack, “NoSQL” and more.

Looking at the theme, the ecosystem and beyond, it will give attendees a pretty good idea on how to create a good reference architecture; their own reference architecture. Learn from all the talks, and the experiences of the people in the trenches.

So what are you waiting for? Register already! Best price registration ends soon (26/01), so don’t wait — save some cash for the drink-fuelled night chats at all the birds-of-a-feather sessions that spillover to the bar ;-)

I’m stoked to be going to FOSSASIA this week. It is in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in Vietnam from 12-14 November (thats this week on Friday-Sunday). There’s a pretty large amount of activities going on, including a MiniDebConf. There also seem to be a huge amount of topics being covered and some pretty interesting speakers, so I can’t hardly wait.

If you’re into MariaDB or MySQL, come catch me at:

• Friday, 10.15-10.30am: 15-minute lightning talk on MariaDB
• Saturday, 3.30-4.30pm: talk on MariaDB
• Sunday, 9.00-11.00am: a hand’s on workshop introducing you to MariaDB/MySQL

I come into Saigon in the evening on the 11th, and depart in the morning on the 15th, but if you have time and want to catch up, don’t hesitate to drop me a line at colin AT askmonty DOT org.

I will be in Manila, Philippines from September 13 – 17 2010. If you want to learn more about MariaDB, talk about MySQL, or just talk about open source in general, there are several opportunities for this:

• Y4iT 2010 (event is September 14-17): Thursday, September 16 2010, 1.50pm, the talk I will give is titled: MariaDB: The new M in LAMP. It was a popular attention grabber during OSCON, where we had a MariaDB booth, and this is a completely new talk, so should be fun to give in front of a huge audience.
• MySQL/MariaDB Meetup on September 16 2010, 4-6pm, at Bahay ng Alumni. This is a meetup, and will be informal, so good for Q&A. Manila doesn’t have a regular MySQL Meetup group, and we’re hoping to kick something off here. Much thanks to Rom Feria, who helped putting everyone together to have this organised!
• DevCon at Y4iT, September 15 2010, 4.30-7.30pm, there will be a lightning talk on MariaDB. These talks are not 5 minutes long, but 10 minutes.

If you’d like to meetup anytime during the week, don’t hesitate to drop me a message via email (colin[at]montyprogram[dot]com) or @reply me on Twitter – I’m @bytebot. I will have my mobile with me, so don’t hesitate to drop me an SMS if required.

A big shoutout to the openSUSE team: openSUSE 11.3 has been released! And with it comes a choice for the database users out there – you can now choose between MySQL or MariaDB.

I wrote in February 2010 that MariaDB was in the unstable repository for openSUSE, and was informed by Michal that it would be included a little while ago. The version that is shipping is MariaDB 5.1.44, and why not give it a download?

So try it. Install via zypper in mariadb.