As I mentioned previously, I’ll be reporting on the conference swag along with the sessions at this year’s MySQL User Conference.

The first candidate? The SCO Giant Pen

Check it out!

There are over 1600 people registered for the conference, a record for the conference (this is the 4th year)!

“It’s fun to be a bus driver when the bus is full” says Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL. 1 billion in hte ‘net, 2 billion with a mobile phone, so there’s a lot of connectivity out there. 6.6 billion people in the world, so 15% are online (1 billion). And there are 20 million MySQL downloads per year, with 1/2 that remaining active. So what happens when the online population doubles?

Corporations are doing the same thing consumers are, and adopting for enterprise use. Corporate functions are hosted or put on-premise, because of the consumer experience (ie, google search).

Humans tend to overestimate the short term, and underestimate the long term. The internet has risen slowly since the bubble burst (which was the “hey, the short term isn’t meeting our expectations!”), and we’ve underestimated that. …

So, we had a really good Cluster BOF last night. Started at 8:30 and at 11pm everybody was tired enough to go to bed :)

Healthy mix of people with deployed clusters, prototype clusters and even some who have looked at MySQL Cluster in the past, decided it wasn’t for them at that point in time, but are still interested enough to show up to the BOF.

It was really freeform (as in I got up and said “there is no agenda for this - what do we want to talk about?”).

We got some really valuable feedback about what people like, dislike and even did hands-up polls of “what do you want us to do first?”. Also got some good suggestions on what to tweak (small fixes) to make people’s lives a lot easier.

The room was pretty well populated as well. my guess was half full (which means nothing until you see the size of the rooms. i’ll try and get a photo at some point).

The consensus at the end seemed to be …

Our partners Solid Information Technology have joined our Certified Engine program and will be making available an open source engine that plugs directly into MySQL.  Solid brings robust OLTP database expertise and their system has been proven in telecommunications and finance for many years.

Solid is showcasing their new engine for MySQL at the MySQL Users conference booth 510 and will also have a presentation at the conference on the technology.   The picture above was from our offices in Cupertino (coincidentally MySQL and Solid are in the same building) when Paola Lubet, VP Marketing from Solid, joined us to celebrate the availability of their new engine.

I love our IT guys. One call to the Cupertino office and one of the IT guys drove to the conference center with the discs needed to reinstall Windows and Office.

I’m now getting everything patched and ready to deliver my session on Managing Hierarchical Data. Sadly there is no recording of the Sakila session because I had to deliver it on a conference-provided PC.

Lessons learned:

Do not sit near high voltage lines and work on your laptop. The only explanation I have for the issues is that I sat near a thick power cable for the lights during the keynote, perhaps it was not well shielded and corrupted files.

Keep your slides in at least three places. When I left I copied my slides from my desktop to my laptop and also to a keychain drive. When my laptop failed I was annoyed but did not panic because I was able to simply insert my keychain into the dekstop provided in the session room and deliver my …

Kai Voigt was making jokes about the secret MySQL underwear. Carol made it real: From the Sakila's Secret Shop we bring you the MySQL Boxers ($10, Cash only).

Second day of the MySQL USers Conference 2006.
At breakfast, Arjen approached me, asking if I could hang nearby the podium during the keynote. "You may end up on stage", he said. I thought that they were going to hand me the iPod that was announced some time ago. So I went there and secured a seat as close as I could, together with Markus, Beat, Roland, and Sheeri.
However, instead of the iPod (I got it after lunch, BTW) I was called on stage to get a Community Award, and the same was granted to Roland, Markus, and …

Back in the days, when the middle "C" in "CCC" still stood for "Communication" and not for "Commerce" and the annual Chaos Communication Congress still happened at the Eidelstedter Bürgerhaus in Hamburg, such improvisation was common and necessary.

Hartmut hijacking one of the conference information system hallway monitors for his hackfest session, since a projection unit was unavailable.

(Flickr Photoset)

Serge van Ginderachter made me think a bit more about quick link to Bait and Switch from yesterday He says :

It's al whole different matter when dual licensing comes with different products. You get one edition in open source, and need to buy a closing source license for another edition with more goodies. In this case you really have pieces of code that mandatorily remain closed source. That is not a good thing.

And indeed I have to elaborate :) It's not the dual licensing as such which is the problem it's the wannabe open source companies that use their minimal open source product as a marketing feature to campaign their more featured commercial product with a similar name but with a totally different featureset. In …

I just read Eric Bergen's blog on row-based replication and application development from the presentation of Row-based replication at the User's Conference. Eric is giving all kinds of new ways to use the replication, for example that for a statement you can now configure the replication to only replicate changes to one of the tables in a multi-table statement. He is, however, missing the most important aspect: everything that we can do now and will be able to do in the future that we couldn't do with just statement-based replication. Here are some things that you can do with row-based replication that was not possible with statement-based replication.

Cluster Replication

Cluster replication is already in 5.1, but it's worth to …