Wednesday night I attended a reception hosted by Sun and managed to win myself a Sun Fire X2100 M2 server!

Swag-wise, the conference was an improvement over last year, as judged by Laura Thomson’s T-Shirt index, with around a dozen shirts to be had.

Welcome to the 93th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Conference season is upon us, so it’s been a busy week. There was the MySQL Conference & Expo, so let’s look at that.

Arjen Lentz posts about Sunday’s community dinner, including the arrival of an unexpected guest. Two photos: one of Pythian’s Paul Vallée getting some Sun; the second from the pre-conference dinner.

Zack Urlocker has a couple pieces with both photos and links to video of the keynote addresses from Marten …

While my involvement can generously be labeled as "minimal", the second edition of High Performance MySQL is slated to hit store shelves soon.

pre-order on Amazon.com

More info is available on O'Reilly.

Thanks to Baron, Peter, Vadim, and Arjen for picking up the torch to get a greatly expanded seconded edition done and out the door. There's a heck of a lot of new material in it.

(comments)

Its worth noting that all talks that have been blogged are being linked on the Forge Wiki. Take a look at Notes from the conference. There are some great entries there, and when the slides become live on the website (today, I believe), you can gather heaps of information, if you missed the most successful MySQL Conference & Expo. Book early for next year.

Thank you bloggers!

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysqluc08, mysqluc2008, mysqlconf, conference notes, …

Pierre notes it is "only a matter of time before an open source company decides patents could be used to solidify open source dual-licensing schemes." I think he's right. In fact, I've seen this very issue rear its ugly head within my own company as I've thought through ways to partner with Microsoft and other proprietary companies.

It would be very easy to do as Novell did: Enter into an agreement to make a version of one's software "safe" from patents. It makes Microsoft happy. Presumably it makes one's users happy ("I'm safe from...my vendor and its partners?!").

But it doesn't fix the downstream problem, and it doesn't fix the broken software patent problem. It trades off FUD to make a sale. Myopic and ultimately damaging to one's customers, one's …

I've changed the ordering handling on the datagrid class so that it is now picked up from SQL query. From the examples hopefully you should be able to work it out. Simply, you specify the connection parameters and the SQL query, and then pass them to a Create() method. The ordering is picked up from the query string, defaulting to that which is specified in the query. You subsequently are returned a datagrid object. Much easier I think. I've not made it live yet, so you'll have to make do with looking at the development version. Barring any catastrophies though this is the code that will go live.

Since I wasn’t able to get to this year’s MySQL UC (employer change caused problems with US visa obtaining and I didn’t get visa in time) I’m really interested in all presentations people are posting after their sessions. I decided to collect them all in one place and would like to share with others - maybe someone will find it interesting to read what people have to say about many interesting aspects of MySQL usage.

So, I’ve created a folder in my Scribd.com account which you could use (and track using RSS readers) to find out what interesting presentations were published. You can use either my account or mysqluc08 folder there. One more possible option to track mysqluc presentations/documents is using our …

Four in the afternoon hit all too quickly today at the UC. 209 exams were delivered with 182 people passing. We had a few minor technical glitches but thanks to the very hard work of the Certification Team's all star players Christine Fortier and Ricky Ho (who managed to perform miracles on a routine basis while getting me trained on how UC exams really work) the three days of testing just went by in a blur.

Thanks to all who participated in the exams this year. There were a lot of very special people at the UC that we got to meet at the Magnolia room.

And special thanks to Jay Pipes who handled the UC and my tedious questions with such ease despite having no luggage for most of the conference.

Exams         Pass Fail Total
Associate 11  0 11
Cluster          7  0  7
DBA-I         57 10 67
DBA-II         46  3 49
DEV-I         34  9 43
DEV-II         27  5 …

So now that you have posted some clarifications on what is going on exactly, it seems like there is less of a problem as original thought. However I must say that the the replies you posted on Jeremy's blog (and later mine as well), you let me to believe that things are quite bad indeed. Only now that I see your two posts on /, I can relax a bit again. Matthew has written a very good …

So, exactly how does one breathe life into a technical blog? My instinctive approach to such tasks—and this is a personal failing to which I freely confess—is to overthink every element of the thing: tone, style, content, title, domain name, what have you.

After a month of dithering, I was struck by the simple fact that a blog is not an astronavigation exam, so all I really need to do is to stop thinking and just...start...writing.

"But about what?"

"Whatever. You'll figure it out. Just start typing. Now."

"But what if someone thinks it sucks?"

"Someone already does. Now get to it."

"But what about my voice? I need a voice. A writer needs a voice."

[cold stare]

Anyway, after a quick survey of the more active MySQL blogs, I developed a sense of what to avoid, what to emulate and perhaps what I might add to the scene.
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