Today I spoke with Farhan “Frank” Mashraqi, former Fotolog DBA, now working at a startup, NetEdge, working on social analytics. He’s talking about the two sessions he’s giving next week at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, as well as the benefits of being at the MySQL Conference & Expo.

He’s giving two talks:

1. Hadoop and MySQL: Friends with Benefits in where he will tell you about how you can combine data sets and queries, some of which run on Hadoop, and others which run on MySQL, but eventually probably end up in MySQL (he works on this cool stuff at NetEdge, the startup he’s currently attached …

Giuseppe Maxia and I are in the exact middle of our leg of theMySQL Campus Tour. Yesterday’s session was recorded — play the video online right in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/700/play or download the 80 Mb .mov file at http://technocation.org/node/700/download.

A PDF of the slides can be downloaded at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Tour.pdf (21 Mb).

Click on the thumbnails for larger pictures of the standing-room only crowd, and lunch with the great folks at Cal Poly afterwards:
…

At the March Boston MySQL User Group meeting, Jacob Nikom of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory presented “Optimizing Concurrent Storage and Retrieval Operations for Real-Time Surveillance Applications.” In the middle of the talk, Jacob said he sometimes calls what he did in this application as “real-time data warehousing”, which was so accurate I decided to give that title to this blog post.

The slides can be downloaded in PDF format (1.3 Mb) at http://www.technocation.org/files/doc/Concurrent_database_performance_02.pdf. The 54 minute video can be downloaded (644Mb) at http://technocation.org/node/693/download or streamed directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/693/play. …

Last week, my good colleague Gerv gently took me to task about requiring that videos submitted to the Mozilla Net Effects video program be licensed under the Creative Common NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (instead of an actual Free Culture licensed like Creative Common ShareAlike license or Creative Common Attribution license) . I thought about this for a while and got to wondering why I’d ever let fear of misuse overcome my experience and common sense.

Licensing and contract choices are often driven by fear and greed. We work, play, love and give in an …

This was an interview Jack Adams did with me at the MySQL/OpenSolaris booth at FOSDEM last weekend. Jack adams is an OpenSolaris mascotte, look around on YouTube for more funny interviews with him.

At the January 2009 Boston User Group I presented a session on the new partitioning feature in MySQL 5.1. I go through how to define partitions, how partitioning makes queries faster, the different types of partitioning and when to use each type, and the restrictions and limitations of partitioning.

The slides are available at http://www.technocation.org/files/doc/2009_01_Partitioning.pdf. The 380.6 Mb .mov movie (1 hr 16 min) can be played directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/671/play or downloaded at http://technocation.org/node/671/download.

Notes:
The partitioning part of the MySQL Manual is at: …

This week we had our first WarpTalks session. Once a month we’ll gather in our meeting room and someone will deliver a talk, workshop or debate about topics considered interesting.

We opened this Monday with two talks. They are in Spanish but you can get the idea.

Introduction to Subversion by Victor Jimenez

Subversion is the RCS we currently use, and the developers know it well enough to do their everyday job, but the not-so technical people at the company have been expecting some training for a while.

Introduccion a Subversion from Jorge Bernal on Vimeo.

10 things you might not know about MySQL by Jorge Bernal (me)

MySQL is the obvious choice when we need a database for our projects, so many of the developers use …

Mozilla, the global community behind the Firefox web browser, has an idea that we need your help with. We want you to help make openness, participation and distributed decision-making common experiences in Internet life.

To do this, millions of people around the world must understand, embrace and share these values. You, me, our families, our neighbor down the street, our political representatives – millions of us from every walk of life in every wired country can help to protect the Net and make it better.

As an experiment working towards this goal, I am coordinating a program that asks people to share short (very, very short – 3 to 12 second) video statements of how the Net has changed their life. We hope that thousands of videos are made by people all over the world and that, through …

My father and I got our 5D MkIIs on Friday and we could hardly wait for the batteries to charge. He took his to SF to test its vaunted low-light performance and posted this 60-second 1080p clip (along with other resolutions) on his SmugMug site: Click to watch it auto-sized for your monitor or check out the full 1080p resolution (caution – *high* bandwidth! UPDATE: Apologies if you tried to watch 1080p on Windows earlier. My bug made it look terrible. Try again, please?).

Here’s his story:

“I had seen Vincent Laforet’s amazing short film, but only in 720p. I knew what an amazing photographer he is and wondered how close an everyman like me could come to footage like that. Could the clips …

Brian Aker delivers the keynote speech at OpenSQL Camp: State of the Open Source Databases. The presentation begins with a disclaimer:
“There is no way I’m going to tell you exactly where the future of databases go. We have way too many egos in the room to ever even begin a discussion…”
and ends with Aker saying,
“What the hell does that mean?”

View the video online at
http://technocation.org/node/649/play
or download the 42.6 MB Flash video file (.flv) directly at http://technocation.org/node/649/download.

My summary: …