Good vibes from Hamburg and Berlin. My colleagues Barbara May, Lenz Grimmer and Jörg Brühe did an excellent job of organizing the event and beating the drum.
Both events were held at the local Sun offices, where we were received warmly with friendship, food, and beverages.
I noticed a common pattern in both places. The audience looked shy and uncooperative in the beginning, and very few questions were asked during the presentation. Shyness? Language barrier? (I was speaking in English while the other speakers were using the local language) Who knows. But things changed dramatically and for the better after the presentation, when all were ushered to the adjoining room where food and beverages were provided generously. The language barrier, if ever existed, disappeared, and questions rained from everywhere.
Perhaps serving beer before the event (like it happened in Paris) is the right path. We'll keep this in mind for the next …

This week I’d expected to hear good friend Giuseppe (CCO) Maxia speak about MySQL SandBox at the Hamburg MySQL April Meetup.

This is product I’ve thought about using, wanted to use, but just never got to the point to using. I download the current version 1.18, I had MySQL tar’s already of 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0 and was all ready until the late topic change.

However due to the language barrier in the second talk, I got a one-on-one lesson. Now I know how it works, and understands the strengths I can use it as part of my standard vanilla testing. There are some improvements I could see, something perhaps I can contribute if they allow a Perl part-timer too. The joy of open source is I can add, modify, change and submit my work, if …

I've created a Flickr group for the 2008 MySQL User's Conference & Expo

http://www.flickr.com/groups/mysqluc2008/

If you are going to the UC, please join, and post interesting pictures.

I'm pleased to announce release of Memcached Functions for MySQL version 0.4. This release has a lot of new goodies, including:

New Functions

memc_add()
memc_add_by_key()
memc_cas()
memc_cas_by_key()
memc_set_by_key()
memc_get_by_key()
memc_replace_by_key()
memc_prepend_by_key()
memc_append_by_key()

Install tools
sql/install_functions.sql - installs these functions via simple sql script

utils/install.pl - interactively installs these functions (perl, DBI/DBD::mysql required)

Benchmark

benchmarks/benchmark.pl - simple dumb perl script to set, get, delete N number of objects,
printing out timings (perl, DBI/DBD::mysql, Time::Hires required)

Docs/Info

* More …

There is a Linked In group I created some time ago but forgot to advertise that is for MySQL Speakers and Presenters.

If you a speaker or presenter of MySQL content, confirm your registration here.
You will need to have a reference to a website confirming you have been a speaker at a MySQL Event such as a User Conference, MySQL Camp or Local MySQL Users Group.

Hopefully overtime we can build a consolidated index at MySQL Forge Presently some pages exist including MySQL Conference & Expo and User Group Presentations but I’m accepting input for a model to have a central page, and link to or upload …

David's thoughts on app engine:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/04/app-engine-facebook-platform-o.html

What do I think? I think I need to not procrastinate by thinking about Google App Engine, instead of getting work done for the MySQL User's Conference next week.

That is a lost cause.

Here goes:

Google Apps Give people private apps under Google Apps and you will kill off a lot of department applications built around Microsoft's Access. If someone builds a "wizard" for building applications then this would go over gang buster (aka the frameworks that Borland used to build).

Lock In Yes this is the mother of all lockins for platform... or is it? I think some smart developers could build out a look a like framework. You would not have …

Reading Barons post about Kickfire Appliance and of course talking to them directly I learned a lot in their product is about beating data processing limitations of current systems.

This raises valid question how fast can MySQL process (filter) data using it current architecture ?
I decided to test the most simple case - what if we take the in memory table with very narrow row and run simple query which needs to do simple filtering - how many rows per second it will be able to do?

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE `m` (
2.   `i` int(11) NOT NULL
3. ) ENGINE=MEMORY DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
4.  
5. mysql> SELECT count(*) FROM m;
6. +----------+
7. | count(*) |
8. +----------+
9. |  1047684 |
…

Are you interested in how to integrate the Zend Framework, Smarty and the Yahoo! UI Library into an infrastructure that makes it comfortable to develop professional web applications? Do you want to know how this infrastrucure is going to form a solid foundation for the MySQL website? And see what the future basement of db4free.net is going to look like?

And are you going to attend the MySQL Users Conference next week?

Then this is a presentation that you don't want to miss:

…

Just a quick note: Kickfire is not based on SSD (solid-state device) hard drives. Their old website says “SQL goes solid state” but that just means SQL in hardware, not SSD.

When I was a child, we had a Sears Lady Kenmore clothes washing machine that boasted “solid-state circuits” on the panel, in flowery script writing. It was not based on SSD, either.

Finally, I am not on the Kickfire payroll. I’m not getting anything from working with them, except perhaps the fun of being in their labs while they’re still in stealth mode. It’s a harder balance than you might think, writing about a product that I don’t know about and am excited to learn about, and sounding objective. If I’m sounding like a fanboy, I don’t mean to. Trust me, if it’s vaporware you’ll hear it here first.

…

It's just a matter of time before Ubuntu is crowned "enterprise ready" by one of the major ISVs. Will it be able to maintain its popularity once it is popular with enterprise buyers?

Ubuntu plays an increasingly important role within the larger Linux market. According to a new white paper from IDC [PDF], Linux is big business and is ready for prime time, with IDC forecasting overall spending on hardware, software, and services for Linux to increase 25.2 percent annually through 2011, particularly at the expense of Unix:

Increasingly, deployments of the Linux server operating system are expanding from infrastructure-oriented workloads to more commercially-oriented workloads such as database, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and other general business processing, workloads that historically have been the domain of Microsoft …