Hey, this was an incredible week and it's hard to believe that it's over! Sorry that you didn't hear or read from me during this week (except of course the people who attended the Conference), but I was (with a few exceptions, thanks to Sheeri and Roland) offline this week and could not post any new articles in that time.

Every individual day was absolutely incredible. The trip was alright, it was my first big journey alone and I was concerned about many things that could possibly go wrong - from how to find my way through the airports (my route was Vienna - London - San Francisco), or since I rented a car, driving in a different country with some different rules and things like that. But it all worked very smoothly and there were no such problems at all ... and I gained a lot of new experiences about travelling. The flights …

Coming away from the MySQL Users Conference I have a short list of questions and/or ideas to research over the next few weeks.

The first is a question posed by an individual after the session on backups. She had been told that mysqldump works good for small installations but once you get above a gigabyte of data it can't handle the dump or restore process.

I've been using mysqlhotcopy for a few years now, but before that was using mysqldump on a few fairly large databases. At the time we switched over to mysqlhotcopy I think our system was around 20 gigs of data, and although the backup/restore process took a good chunk of …

Travelling on from Vancouver, I'll be visiting the Seattle MySQL UG meetup on Monday, and the Chicago MySQL UG one on Wednesday. So if you want to catch me on my "world tour" and are in one of the above places, this is your chance ;-)

Julian Cash stopped by the MySQL User Conference and took a bunch of neat photos. Here are some of the best ones.

I spend the past week in florida. First visiting my parents and then spending time at php|tek where I was invited to give two talks. I was quite nervous about the first talk about "database schema deployment". My original intention was to create a working solution to handle scripting the necessary DDL and DML statements to manage schema updates. However while researching the topic I found that its even less trivial than I expected. So during my talk I was mainly giving some basic ideas along with a number of ideas to explore depending on the needs. For example if all you care about is generating DDL then things are quite simple. In the past MySQL indirectly benefited from the simplicity of the database but with foreign keys, views, stored procedures and triggers even generating DDL is not entirely …

Another one of the sessions at the MySQL Users Conference I attended was Tuning MySQL5 SQL and Stored Procedures by Guy Harrison from Quest Software. A global company with 6000+ customers.

Guy has written a number of Oracle Performance Books in the past. His work now is on the “Spotlight” product family - Database diagnositic tools converting data to graphical representations. For these products, MySQL 5 and InnoDB only is necessary, simply due to accessing the right internal information for presentation. There are Freeware MySQL product downloads.

In this presentation he stated, nothing he was talking about specifically was relatively new. He did make quite a funny comment, “He is now seeking refugee status in the MySQL …

I didn’t take any photos myself at the MySQL User’s Conference. In reflection, perhaps I should. I did make it into some photos however. A few of them here.

Stolen from Jeremy Cole’s Photos at http://jcole.us/gallery/uc2006

This post recorded mid-day on Friday.

The MySQL User conference has ended and I find myself waiting for my flight home — a good time to gather thoughts.

I personally think the conference was a great success. We had over 1500 attendees and the feedback I heard on the conference was very positive. I did hear a few asking for the sessions to be longer than 45 minutes and I do agree that 45 minutes can be a bit cramped, especially for a speaker who is re-using a session previously delivered in a longer block, but overall the response was great.

I had three sessions this year, and those sessions seemed well received by the attendees I spoke to. I am *very* glad that I backed up my slides to a keychain drive and ghosted my drives before leaving as it made the crashing of my laptop an annoyance rather than an unmitigated disaster. I worry that the distraction of a laptop crash may have left me at less than 100% for my sessions …

Update: High Res Versions at http://www.openwin.org/mike/wordpress/wp-gallery2.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=1198

This year there was a nice little bonus, Julian Cash was on hand to take photos of the staff with a proper studio setup. I’ve seen some of his work before and liked it, and was looking forward to a session. When the photo sessions were announced, we were asked to bring a prop that represented ourselves or our work or personality. I actually forgot about the prop requirement but went for a session on the way to my Hierarchy talk and walked in carrying a stack of books to give away. Julian took one look and pronounced ‘Great Prop!’ upon seeing my stack of books. It was not planned as a prop, but seeing as I am a technical writer and …