This past Tuesday I was doing more than just voting.  I was giving a live webinar on using MySQL with the Entity Framework.  We had a terrific time (demo machine crash included!) and had a great turnout.  I have been informed that we set records for most number of registrations and attendees.  I’m truly honored and hope that at least some of you got something out of it.

I’ve had a lot of people ask me for the materials from the session so I’ve made them available from my personal server.  You can get the slides, sample projects, and db script here.  The webinar was also recorded and will appear on this page eventually.

Thanks again to all who attended.  I’m hoping to give an expanded version of this session at our users conference …

Karim Lakhani has put together a business case study on Wikipedia. It is worth noting that Wikipedia uses MySQL as its database engine. 

Note that I’m talking about using these tools in some kind of professional way, and more specifically, I’m talking about using Excel as a database, and using VPS hosting to host “professional” web sites. By “professional”, I mean something other than your personal blog, picture gallery, or other relatively inconsequential site.

Excel is not a database

Here’s the thing: Excel isn’t a database. Most people who don’t work in IT don’t seem to understand this, and they’re deathly afraid to actually communicate with anyone in IT, so they take matters into their own hands, and create problems so big that IT is forced to get involved, because at some point this spreadsheet becomes “critical” to some business function. Then IT gets even more bitter toward the non-IT folk, validating some of the reasons the non-IT folk went that route in the first place, and virtually guaranteeing that they won’t come to the IT …

If that was too cryptic, here's the news: we've extended the deadline on the Call for Papers for the upcoming MySQL User Conference which will be held April 20-23 in Santa Clara CA.  You've got until Nov 5 to get your proposals in. 

If you want to increase your odds of being accepted, here are some tips:

• Make it technical, but accessible
• Include both theory and practice (e.g. here's what we did and why)
• Clearly identify who your talk is for (e.g. developers, DBAs, …

I’ve been doing a little reporting project, and I’ve been searching around for quite some time for a good graphing and charting solution for general-purpose use. I had come across ReportLab before, but it just looked so huge and convoluted to me, given the simplicity of what I wanted at the time, that I moved on. This time was different.

This time I needed a lot of the capabilities of ReportLab. I needed to generate PDFs (this is not a web-based project), I needed to generate charts, and I wanted the reports I was generating to contain various types of text objects in addition to the charts and such.

I took the cliff-dive into the depths of the ReportLab documentation. I discovered three things:

1. There is quite a lot of documentation
2. ReportLab is quite a capable library
3. The documentation actually defies the simplicity of the library.

It’s a decent bit easier than it …

So, I recently ran into one of those situations where a customer complains that his MySQL database is slow, and “it worked great until about two weeks ago”. The first thing I look at in these situations is not the queries or any code, but the indexes. Once I determined that the indexes were almost nonsensical, I had a look at the queries themselves, which proved that the indexes were, in fact, nonsensical. Running the queries as written in the code, from a mysql shell, with EXPLAIN, I was able to further confirm that the indexes (most of them, anyway) were never used.

Easy right? Just reindex the table!

NOTE: I’m going to skip the talk about all of the database design issues on this gig and just go straight to solving the immediate problem at hand. Just know that I had nothing to do with the design.

But, supposing this table has 15 million rows and is running on a machine with 2GB of RAM and only …

My presentation, entitled “MySQL for non-DBAs” went well…considering the very broad topic and that the laptop I was going to present from decided to have a hissy fit. It was my work-sanctioned XP Pro laptop and the registry decided to corrupt itself, causing it to reboot over and over and over and…. Oh joy! Luckily, the group organizer allowed me to borrow his Mac and since I had the presentation on a USB drive (OpenOffice.org format, of course) we were rockin’ and rollin’ in no time.

I took the “MySQL 5.0 for DBAs” course last year. That was a 5-day course that used over 220+ slides. I compressed over three quarters of that content down to about 40 slides for a 2-hour talk with some live demo work thrown in for good measure. It was a tough presentation to put together given such a large amount of information. I tried to highlight the design, the engines, the commands, etc.. I relied on audience questions to act as tangents …

On his blog, Kaj Arnö has been writing about MySQL news, events, community and business developments for some time.

His most recent posts include (1)  a thank you note to David Axmark, one of the MySQL founders, for his 20-year contributions to MySQL and FOSS, and (2) an announcement regarding the move from MySQL contributor license agreement (MySQL CLA) to Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA), which is expected to be more contributor friendly.   

First, AddThis.com (where I was the director of IT) and Clearspring have merged! A side effect of that is that I’m now (happily, on purpose, by choice) a full-time consultant! I’ll have a web site up soonish. Until then, check back here for updates. If you’re a tech firm who needs help, and don’t mind remote workers, send mail to bkjones at Google’s mail service (.com).

Some folks thought I’d passed away due to the uncharacteristic lull in posting frequency on this blog. I’m very much alive — but working for a startup and maintaining a consulting business simultaneously is hard, especially when two large projects fall into your lap at the same time. So what have I been up to?

Well, as part of the now-public merger between the company I worked for and the new company, …

I volunteered to give a presentation on MySQL at the next NoVaLUG (http://www.novalug.com) meeting, Oct 4th. Topics to include: installation, configuration, administration, replication, backup/restore, architecture, monitoring and troubleshooting. I won’t be deep-diving on any particular topic (too much for the time slot) but, instead, focusing on the basics.

Should be a fun time.