I am starting a trip of two days to Munich to attend tomorrow, October 21st 2008, the MySQL™ Central EU Customer Conference.

And.. sure! I am still wondering why I am coming stated that I don’t understand German :-/
I thought that the Conference was in English or at least part of it but.. eh eh eh.. it seems it isn’t.

Two things deceived me. The name “Central Europe” and the possibility to come with some friends which are used to go in Germany in this period to drink liters of beer.

Possibility no. two vanished cause one of them went away to U.S. for a short period @ Standford University and the others are very busy during this week.

Moral:

• devote yourself to Euroregions and EU Political Integration as much as you can, :-0 …

Stop the press! My boss, Stefan Hinz, has just started blogging, with his first post here: Using NetBeans with MySQL.

So who is he? Well, Stefan is the guy that keeps the rest of us in the docs team in check and makes sure we do what we’re asked, when we’re are asked and that all of the machinery, legalities and management tasks happen in the background. Without him we really couldn’t function as effectively as we do.

It’s wonderful to see some other Docs team members getting in on the act (to be fair to the rest of the team, Jon is also a blogger). We are all writers, you would think the blogging would come as a natural extension.

Behind the tease is the simple fact that the improved system for MySQL University I was talking about is getting a trial run this week. …

The next MySQL University session will take place this Thursday, 23rd October. David Van Couvering will show how to use NetBeans with MySQL.

Note that this session will start at 9:00 Pacific Time (18:00 CET, 17:00 BST).

For this session, we'll use a new presentation system that we hope will make things much easier for both presenters and attendees: Dimdim (www.dimdim.com). If it works out as expected, Dimdim will replace our current presentation system which required attendees to open a browser, connect to an IRC channel on Freenode, and open some fancy URL with a voice streaming application. With Dimdim, all that needs to be done is point your browser to a URL, and that's it. …

One day we'll change some defaults to be more realistic, but in the meantime, please make sure you have set your FragmentLogFileSize and NoOfFragmentLogFiles to something big! Like, if you have 20Gb, set it the size to 256Mb and number of log files to 176, something like that (watch the diskspace though!). The thing his, if you need to restore your backup, you will run into problems and it just takes time, precious time to get it back up!
Anyway, those are not the only ones, and those hard hard to set later on (needs initial node restart, rolling though).

More in our all mighty manual and Johan's configuration tool.

I recently attended an interesting talk by Brion Vibber, CTO of WikiMedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation that runs the infrastructure for Wikipedia. He described how his team of 7 engineers manages the Wikipedia site that gets on an average of 7 billion page views per month. The highlights from the talk are listed below that included the architecture of the site infrastructure to scale up to the traffic that is received. They are ranked amongst the Top 10 sites in terms of traffic.

The site runs on the LAMP stack and you know what that is:

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL from Sun
• Perl/PHP/Python/Pwhatever :-)
  

WikiMedia runs the site on about 400 x86 servers. Of those, about 250 run the webservers and the remaining run MySQL database. Recently they acquired the …

As part of an internal programme at Sun, I am a “SEED mentor” for another Sun employee (not a former employee of MySQL, but what we Sun Dolphins call Sun Classics). He is called Alok and lives in Bangalore, and sadly, our schedules crossed so that I couldn’t meet him when I was at our Bangalore offices in July. So I am mentoring someone I’ve met only over phone — but we’re getting along just fine.

Two of the topics we’ve discussed recently are blogging and books. So after hanging up after our 9 CET 12:30 Indian time mentoring session, I got the idea to combine the two: write a blog entry about the books I recommended Alok.

One thing Alok is contemplating at the moment is the degree to which he should spend time on developing his business skills vs his engineering skills. That’s a familiar topic for many of us in …

CIO published an article highlighting 5 cheap (or free) software that can be afforded during financial crisis. Their recommendations are:

• Open Office ($0) instead of Microsoft Office ($110 for basic version)
• Mozilla Thunderbird ($0) instead of Microsoft Outlook (lots of security issues)
• GnuCash ($0) instead of Quicken ($30 for starter edition)
• Alfresco ($0) instead of Sharepoint ($5K for five licenses)
• …

I’ve mentioned a number of times that the documentation repositories that we use to build the docs are freely available, and so they are, but how do you go about using them?

More and more people are getting interested in being able to work with the MySQL docs, judging by the queries we get, and internally we sometimes get specialized requests.

There are some limitations - although you can download and access the docs and generate your own versions in various formats, you are not allowed to distribute or supply that iinformation, it can only be employed for personal use. The reasons and disclaimer for that are available on the main page for each of the docs, such as the one on the 5.1 Manual.

Those issues aside, if you want to use and generate your own docs from the Subversion source tree then you’ll need the following:

• …

I recently attended an interesting talk by Brion Vibber, CTO of WikiMedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation that runs the infrastructure for Wikipedia. He described how his team of 7 engineers manages the Wikipedia site that gets on an average of 7 billion page views per month. The highlights from the talk are listed below that included the architecture of the site infrastructure to scale up to the traffic that is received. They are ranked amongst the Top 10 sites in terms of traffic.

The site runs on the LAMP stack and you know what that is:

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL from Sun
• Perl/PHP/Python/Pwhatever :-)
  

WikiMedia runs the site on about 400 x86 servers. Of those, about 250 run the webservers and the remaining run MySQL database. Recently they acquired the …

I recently attended an interesting talk by Brion Vibber, CTO of WikiMedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation that runs the infrastructure for Wikipedia. He described how his team of 7 engineers manages the Wikipedia site that gets on an average of 7 billion page views per month. The highlights from the talk are listed below that included the architecture of the site infrastructure to scale up to the traffic that is received. They are ranked amongst the Top 10 sites in terms of traffic.

The site runs on the LAMP stack and you know what that is:

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL from Sun
• Perl/PHP/Python/Pwhatever :-)
  

WikiMedia runs the site on about 400 x86 servers. Of those, about 250 run the webservers and the remaining run MySQL database. Recently they acquired the …