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/

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/

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/

I took a little break over the Christmas period and avoided using the computer as much as possible, so this is my first blog of the year. I mentioned AJAX in my last blog and in the time since then my demo was completed (after a few teething problems). I gave a demo to my boss and a couple of clients on Friday and it went down really well, it's often difficult with clients as people are so used to computers these days people have a certain level of expectation and while us as technical people can see the benefits of something like AJAX it's often lost in translation somewhere along the line. Thankfully in this case they were really keen and we are in the process of setting up a test to see if it improves the clients business.

Last week I recieved my iPod Nano, the prize from the MySQL 5.0 competition. It had been a while in coming due to me not being home when the delivery company called before Christmas. It's small, very small but …