I have been really busy for the past few days and didn't get a chance to post anything on my MySQL blog. I have recently moved to Lavonia, GA (don't ask me why) and have been working on my Open Encyclopedia project.

First, thanks to everyone for helping me out with my last post. Honestly, the power of the community at MySQL makes me love it more and more every day.

While implementing Jeremy's mytop, I decided to give the help files a full read this time and was quite surprised to find Jeremy recruiting for Yahoo!. Since then I have been really thinking about sending my resume to Yahoo (the one I wrote for Google but never mailed). I have decided I can willingly work for any company so long its not Google.

Here are some news briefs that I wanted to blog about:

During the …

Last night I noticed the article put up by Zawodny on why Slashdot is doomed(!) and Digg is the future. Its not that I disagree with him on the point about Digg being something that people are using, but I am surprised that he thinks it is a Slashdot replacement. Part of what makes sites like Slashdot interesting, and the same goes for BoingBoing, are the people who edit them. Its not just enough to post a bunch of links. Information needs to be filtered. There is a firehose which is the Internet, and someone has to channel it. Since the information is free that means anyone can decide to aggregate it, but someone needs to do that. The fact that Digg is not a replacement is obvious after you read the latest O'Reilly Radar post by Nat.

In the case of Slashdot you get a Rob plus …

Last night I noticed the article put up by Zawodny on why Slashdot is doomed(!) and Digg is the future. Its not that I disagree with him on the point about Digg being something that people are using, but I am surprised that he thinks it is a Slashdot replacement. Part of what makes sites like Slashdot interesting, and the same goes for BoingBoing, are the people who edit them. Its not just enough to post a bunch of links. Information needs to be filtered. There is a firehose which is the Internet, and someone has to channel it. Since the information is free that means anyone can decide to aggregate it, but someone needs to do that. The fact that Digg is not a replacement is obvious after you read the latest O'Reilly Radar post by Nat.

In the case of Slashdot you get a Rob plus …

Just got home from tonight's Boston MySQL Meetup. The subject was MySQL Backups. Sheeri did a great presentation and then it was opened up to the group to discuss various options. I counted 32 attendees at one point.

I was interested to hear one person's experience with backups on a terrabyte database of InnoDB tables. He indicated that in their work they've found the best performing backup is to lock the tables in MySQL and then use Winzip to archive the tables. Much better performance than mysqlcopy, mysqldump or InnoDB hot backup (they found the InnoDB tool to be the slowest option, to the point of unusability). That kind of insight is so valuable.

Replication was a hot topic, Sheeri touched on this as a backup option for certain scenarios and it got a lot of non-backup questions. Seems like a good topic for a future …

My sound card wasn't working, so I installed ubuntu. now it works. I wiped my old testing version of maxdb and am now using the debian version.

I am going to see about making a synch manager debian package if one does not already exist.

My sound card wasn't working, so I installed ubuntu. now it works. I wiped my old testing version of maxdb and am now using the debian version.

I am going to see about making a synch manager debian package if one does not already exist.

It's official, Jay Pipes (co-author of Pro MySQL) is now at MySQL (AB/Inc.) as the North America Community Relations Manager. Jay told me he'd applied for the job back when Kaj wrote about it, looks like a really cool position and exciting opportunity to be immersed in the open source community.

Congratulations. Looking forward to hearing about the adventures of a MySQL employee and to more great things from the community team.

Well, today I started working for MySQL as Community Relations Manager, North America. I've been a bit absent on the blog for the past few weeks as I have been in interviews with MySQL and travelled to Cupertino, California and met with a number of MySQL employees.

So, what exactly does the Community Relations team at MySQL do? I suppose the easiest way to describe our function is to think of us as liaisons between the larger open-source community, the smaller MySQL user community, and MySQL the company. We think up programs, promotions, articles, and tools to help the MySQL user community better understand and use the MySQL products. We identify open source projects using (and potentially using) MySQL and help those projects best utilize MySQL products. We present and find interesting people to present at the MySQL User's Conference as well as other open source conferences. And, of course, …

The eZ publish Conference 2006 Call for Papers ends in one week (Monday, Jan 16).

Don't forget to submit your proposals! We already have a great lineup of speakers and attendees for the event, including core team members from PHP, MySQL, the Mozilla Foundation and much more. Don't miss the chance to meet them!

I‘ll be at the MySQL meetup tonight, as will many others. If you‘re interested in meeting some MySQL users and developers in the Chicago area, please drop by!

More information is at http://mysql.meetup.com/5/