Well, it seems according to the MySQL Certification team, that after completing the new MySQL Cluster certification exam on the first day of the conference, I am the third person in the world to passed this certification. The position is only based on the time I got to see the results as I had Kim from Singapore do the exam as well, which I am sure he would have had no problem passing either.

So what does this mean? Well, apart from being the first in Australia (seeing Stewart is too busy building the software to do the exams :) to receive the certification, it means that I will have a certificate to show clients that I know what I am doing in MySQL Cluster.

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Beth Breidenbach, having braved a week thick with posts from the MySQL Conference, has published the 42nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, on Confessions of a database geek. Good one, Beth! Here’s Log Buffer #42.

Ask and you shall receive: http://face.centosprime.com/rdb-w/?p=68 linked to my previous post on the Data Warehousing Tips and Tricks session (http://sheeri.net/archives/204) with the comment, “I need to learn more about MERGE TABLES and INSERT ? ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE“.

So here’s a bit more:

The manual pages for the MERGE storage engine:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/merge-storage-engine.html
and
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/merge-table-problems.html

MySQL Forums for the MERGE talbe are at:
…

So as one of the last speakers, I finally got the opportunity to hold my talk on PHP6. You can find the pdf in my slides section as always. I was actually positively surprised that the room was fairly full, considering that I had seen several people head off to the airport already. I first asked how many people are still on PHP4 and a fair number raised their arms. Anyways, for some reason I felt that I was not speaking as fluent as I can, so I am a bit disappointed with my performance as a speaker. The slides however are probably the most complete resource for people who want to mentally prepare themselves for PHP6. One note of warning though: During my talk I noted that any of the changes/features listed …

Frank asks us to vote on his Barcamp presentation. I also asked to do so on the Barcamp site

For Frank my vote is on the "Rails doesn't scale topic", (I'd say OpenID but I guess I misunderstood Pascal saying he'd do something on that yesterday)

But as I see that lots of people are looking at how to use MySQL and scale it I'd figure maybe I should do a talk on MySQL Cluster , so send in the votes !

I missed a couple of talks that I’d really have liked to attend, for various reasons (probably the fact that at the MySQL conferences, staff also have a tonne of meetings and customers/people to meet). Thanks to the great bloggers, I don’t feel so bad for missing such talks. And for the ones with no blogs and notes, well, I’ll just hope and dream up the fact that sometime in the future, there will be video recorded sessions, available on the same day on the Internet, in OGG (like was done at linux.conf.au 2007).

Eric Lai has an interesting article in ComputerWorld titled: How Digg.com uses the LAMP stack to scale upward. And Mike Kruckenberg had some of his notes, which I think are also useful. Considering Digg.com …

The conference is now over and I am glad it is. It was an intense four days of information exchange and meeting interesting people. The feeling I now have is twofold: One end says: "Woohooo! That was great, got to do that again."; The other is: "But not anytime soon!". Thanks to Jay Pipes for putting a lot work into making this happen.

And special thanks, of course, to Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen of Proven Scaling who spent some serious coin to have J.R., Carlos and me attend. You rock!

I couldn't find an official announcement, but there will be a MySQL Conference in Tokyo later this year. Now, what talks could I submit for that? :-)

Adam Donnison hosted a session about how the *.mysql.com websites are architectured. He explaind how the situation was before they started building the current implementation and showed several drawbacks with that approach (Apache and MySQL on the same machine, no failover) and how they fixed it. He even showed how well the new MySQL Monitoring solution works without noticing that while he is showing live data, that the monitor reports a peak of requests and several red (dangerous) areas in the system. The site went effectively down when he explained how easy all this is to manage. He got very busy when we notified him, but he actually got everything up and running again within a few minutes.

MySQL 5.1 comes with a new feature called Events. This is effectively a user-friendly cron-mechanism built into MySQL. Very nice. Other goodies can be found in the manual.