In celebration of my arrival in Bangkok the opposition party is apparently planning a million person “red shirt” rally. Exciting! On the bright side, “The UDD [United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship] can only afford to keep its protest going for three to five days. If the government has not fallen by that time, it will have to withdraw and draw up a new strategy.” I always pick the best times to travel. (Mom, don’t worry. I’ll stay safe!)

We planned for a company meeting to be in Iceland, with just about a month’s notice. You can do that, when you’re a fairly small company. Having been back from London during the winter, where it was snowing in the New Year, I was not exactly jumping high to visit Iceland. Ice? Gasp.

It was not exactly easy to get to Iceland: KUL – SIN – FRA – CPH – KEF. Five countries, in a little over a day (would have been about it, had it not been due to a delayed flight from Copenhagen — seemed that the plane was snowed in from Iceland). Upon getting my boarding pass for the last leg, I was asked by the SAS ticketing agent if I’d like a window seat – I naturally replied aisle, and he confirmed my choice with me, as if shocked. Then I realised, there might be some interesting …

I’m a little behind in announcing this but I’m going to be speaking at O’Reilly’s MySQL Conference this year. My presentation is a three hour tutorial titled, Drizzle Storage Engine Development. Practical Example with BlitzDB. Three hours is a long time but I assure you that there will be a break.

This session isn’t solely about going through Drizzle’s Storage Engine API. Various performance topics like B+Tree structure, memory handling and concurrency control will be covered. I will also go through BlitzDB’s design concept and it’s internal stuff. So, needless to say I’ll talk a lot about Tokyo Cabinet and it’s internals as well.

Hopefully those that come along will walk out of the tutorial standing far ahead of the start line. It will help you get started on reading the implementation of other storage engines in the …

After a nice long vacation, it's time to unveil our destinations for public classes in 2010.  We are now offering a course for Developers as well as DBAs.  The dates are:

• Seattle 16 February
• San Francisco 18-19 February
• Boston 22-23 February
• New York City 25-26 February
• Montréal …

Last week, my colleagues Giuseppe, Kai and myself attended the SAPO Codebits event in Lisbon, Portugal. Codebits is an annual, invite-only hacking event, which went on for three days. The venue they chose this year was the "Cordoaria", a former rope factory located in the Belém district, close to the 25 de Abril Bridge (which is an impressive sight!). I have been told that the Cordoaria is the longest building in Portugal and I have no doubts about that! The building is so long that the crew used bicycles to get from one end to the other. I've taken a number of …

This time of the year is usually a very busy one, as there are plenty of events and conferences to attend. Just take a look at our calendar of OSS events on the MySQL Forge to see what I mean! Here's a quick summary of the ones that I will attend and speak at until the end of this year:

On November 14-15, I'll attend the openSQL Camp in Portland (OR), USA. I missed the first one that took place in Charlottesville (VA) in 2008, but had a lot of fun organizing the European Edition earlier this year. The upcoming one will be more like an unconference again - the list of …

This is a quick announcement to say that I'll be speaking at HighLoad++ this year (October 12-14 in Moscow).  I'll be presenting on a few topics:

• MySQL Performance Tuning (Conference Session)
• Quick Wins with Third Party Patches for MySQL (Conference Session)
• Performance Optimization for MySQL with InnoDB and XtraDB * (Full day class)

This will mark my first trip to Russia - and oh boy am I excited.  I'm taking a few days vacation after so I can tour around Saint Petersburg.  Want to say hello?  Let me know at morgan-at-percona-dot-com!

* Yes, this is the same as our InnoDB course we taught last week in Santa Clara and …

Today's the day I fly to Los Angeles to teach a private training class, en route to Santa Clara/San Francisco for our public training workshops next week.

Our Montreal practice teach at Station-C went great - it was an opportunity to do a road test and iron out any kinks in the delivery.

What did I learn in the process?

• Solid examples provide context.  I didn't have the best SHOW GLOBAL STATUS data for the practice teach, but I've edited my slides and our official classes will have much better information.
• Operational issues are one of the most important things people want to hear more information on.  A fair number of students know that dropping an index is not as painless as it should be, but not everyone knows about tools like Flipper and MMM.  It's not the main focus of our InnoDB/XtraDB workshop, but we will cover how to solve these …

The summer break seems to be over and the event season is heating up again! There is a number of conferences and events coming up in the next months — here is a quick summary of the events that I plan to attend.

This Friday I will attend an event here in Hamburg: the "Silpion Sommerfest", organized by Silpion (a local IT solutions provider which is a partner of Sun Microsystems as well). I will be there to network and talk about MySQL.

This coming weekend (2009-09-12/2009-09-13), there will be the PHP Unconference here in Hamburg, Germany . It will consist of two days of Barcamp-style sessions about …