The latest from the MySQL community

Do you know MySQL? Can you talk to an audience of your peers? Then new opportunities are waiting for you.

There are many speaking opportunities for you to speak to folks who want to hear about MySQL! People want to hear what you have learned the hard way, serendipitously discovered, researched rigorously, or your best practice. You may have groups in your area that are looking for you to present. MySQL is a very popular subject at all sorts of conferences and you do not need to be guru-level to be a speaker.

If you live near the following cities or plan to visit them, please check out these calls for papers!

Baltimore? Railsconf Call for papers end Feb 17th.

Graz? Grazer Linuxtage Call for papers ends March 1st.

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It was ready for a while already, but now it's part of the official FOSDEM schedule as well: I am very pleased to announce the presentations and speakers of the MySQL & Friends Developer Room, which will take place this coming Saturday (5th of February) in Brussels, Belgium.

This year, our DevRoom will be located in room H.2213 (in the H Building), which has a capacity of up to 100 people and will be available to us from 13:00-19:00 o'clock. We have 12 sessions lined up, each will last 25 minutes (incl. Q&A). Without further ado, here's our schedule:

Just a quick reminder: the Oracle user groups of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Russia are organizing a joint conference, the Harmony. It will take place on May 19th-20th in Helsinki, Finland. I've met the organizers at the IOUC summit that took place at the Oracle HQ this week and they would love to have some more MySQL content. So if you have an idea for a talk about a MySQL-related topic, please submit it! The call for papers closes on February, 1st!

My calendar is filling up with speaking engagements about MySQL at various events quickly. Here is a list of events for the coming months where I'll be present:

• On Wednesday, January 26th, I will be speaking about MySQL High Availability Solutions at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup. I feel honored for having been invited to speak there and I'm quite excited that venue is fully booked! I look forward to meeting so many MySQL users in one place.
• On Saturday, February 5th, I'll be attending and speaking at the MySQL & Friends Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. I helped organizing the DevRoom and preparing the schedule for this event. We …

Phew, here we go, this blog post has been long time coming! A few months ago I started toying around with the idea of analyzing the PlanetMySQL public blog feed. It doesn’t take long to extract the data and prepare it for analysis but between lots of work and procrastination this blog post was left unfinished.

It was partly out of pure curiosity and partly the fact that it seemed to me there were less posts than previous years that I decided to trend out the number of posts over the past years and here we go.

The blue line shows the blog posts per month over the past six years and the black line is a polynomial trend line. There are a few points of interest which are visible and I’ll be listing here (to all their understanding):
1. The first thing which struck me negatively is …

I’ll be giving a workshop/tutorial on MySQL Performance Tuning at the PHPBenelux 2011 Conference in Belgium. It’s 3.5 hours and I am sure I can discuss the new MySQL v5.5 release too.

Lots of stuff will be discussed, including configuration, understanding status variables, finding bad queries, schema tips, etc..

If you got particular ideas or concerns and are attending, just leave me message or just comment on this blog post. I’ll see if I can fit it in.

Maybe we can fix the …

I will be speaking at least once at the 2011 O'Reilly MySQL conference. I
have not heard back on all my proposed session but I will be talking
about Open Source BI tools. There are several great packages to help
DBAs make reports from their MySQL instances. These tools are great for
simple ad-hoc reports to highly detailed data dumps.

I will present on "Testing LAMP Applications" at the O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011:

Proper interaction with relational databases is incredibly important in most pieces of software. The importance of this interaction is underscored by the fact that many software architectures have at least one entire layer or system devoted to data persistence and data loading. When dealing with critical data in enterprise level applications it becomes even more important to make sure your data is being stored and retrieved correctly.

As responsible developers, one of our goals should be to test database interaction and test it well. To help achieve …