The people, plain and simple.

I encourage you, if you are not part of the local MySQL community, then why not? Find a local MySQL Meetup group, attend the MySQL Conference, get online to IRC @ freenode#mysql, subscribe to some lists or read the forums. I didn’t meet these people being an observer, but part of the community.

As I wrote recently with some vacation time and the need to pick the brain of some experts I organized a quick trip to Germany to specifically visit Jan Kneschke and Paul McCullagh to improve my MySQL skills in certain areas on my own time …

Three small per session tips in improving the speed of loading into Innodb Tables (assuming you already have a correctly configured Innodb environment)

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;
SET AUTOCOMMIT  = 0;
SET UNIQUE_KEYS = 0; # if you know your data is clean.

I wanted to follow up my earlier post My Ideas for MySQL Camp III with some of motivations. Luckily, good friend and colleague Jeremy literally took all of 15 mins to respond to my post with “So, I see your vision for the event itself. What?s your vision for the results of the event?” (Unfortunately with 150+ draft posts, it’s taken some time to complete my reply).

The present differentiation of MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise in my eyes is a joke. Now before I start or re-start more then already one flame war let me first talk about MySQL Enterprise. MySQL Enterprise is a great and necessary product offering by MySQL Inc. It serves essential services to essential customers with features such as commercial 24×7 support, MySQL Enterprise Monitor which is an excellent start when clients have nothing (and boy …

The Conference Speakers of the 2008 MySQL Conference provides some common and interesting names of companies not common in MySQL circles such as eBay, Microsoft Corporation, HP, Symantec. I see speakers outside of MySQL from countries including USA, Canada, Brazil, Germany, Japan and Australia.

I did some data analysis of the speakers list. There are 150 speakers, there are 45 from MySQL. Other companies with multiple speakers include Sun Microsystems, Kickfire, Linbit, Cafepress, Open Query, Proven Scaling, Standford Linear Accelerate Center, UC Berkeley, Siz Apart, The Hive, Zmanda, MySQL Performance Blog, Infobright, Digg, Grazr and of course PrimeBase Technologies.

Only two MySQL speakers have listed “MySQL/Sun” the rest are “MySQL”. I wonder what the policy is here? You have “Oracle / Innobase” and “Innobase / Oracle Corp.” …

Following A day with Jan Kneschke - Architect of MySQL Proxy, today I’m with Michael Zinner in Vienna, Austria. Michael is Team Lead of the MySQL GUI tools team at MySQL.

I met Michael two years ago the 2006 MySQL Users Conference. We had communicated prior to that and I’d even used his very successful DB Designer a number of years prior to this. The present project of the GUI team is the MySQL Workbench which is a beta release.

Again, I find a key MySQL developer using a Mac, this time as …

I’ve been accepted to speak at the upcoming 2008 OSCON Conference in Portland Oregon July 21-25 2008, where I’ll be speaking with Giuseppe Maxia on MySQL Proxy. I haven’t seen a schedule yet, so I’m interested if there are any other presenters on MySQL topics!

It’s just three weeks now before the 2008 MySQL Conference. Good to see my mug shot on the front page (see screen shot below).

I will still be presenting my session Top 20 DB Design Tips Every Architect Needs to Know, however as a departing MySQL Employee I’ve had to give up the chance to present the “MySQL for Oracle DBA’s Bootcamp” tutorial, content that I developed for MySQL specifically and have already presented three one day seminars in New York, San Francisco and Washington DC.
Update March 26 2008. I should clarify that I notified MySQL as part of my exit items that I would not be able to present the Tutorial. I would very much like to, and being the author of the content I am well qualified, however as this was developed for MySQL and …

This post is incomplete without mentioning the previous one about development tools, so make sure you read it before/after this.
In this post, I'd like to mention two monitoring tools, and one knowledge base.

Two of the tools are made by Quest Software/ToadSoft that make Toad for MySQL. Both of them are Freeware.
A side note: TOAD was born as "Tool for Oracle Application Developers". Because "Tool for Oracle Application Developers for MySQL" sounds weird, TOAD is known officially as "Tool For Application Developers".

Spotlight for MySQL
Spotlight is a tool perhaps more known among SQL Server and Oracle users. It shows …

If you're serious about MySQL, it doesn't hurt to know the people closely tied to its development and maintenance as well as famous bloggers. Here's my ongoing list of people I consider important:

Peter Zaitsev - MySQL Performance Blog, former head of MySQL AB High Performance Group. His company Percona is available for consulting. He's a co-author of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition (great book).

Baron Schwartz - also know as Xaprb, Baron a co-author of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition and creator of …

In the past few months I’ve not had to look for a job, they look for me. If your a well qualified MySQL DBA there are many opportunities, I’ve had so many of these offers in the past 12 months I’ve lost count. However a DBA job would not offer the job satisfaction I’m seeking in my career goals now in 2008.

I’ve been able to consider 4 genuine positions in just the past few weeks, and indeed my new employer Primebase Technologies was someone I’d never considered working for, and indeed they had never considered me until a chance lunch meeting less then one month ago.

I did seriously consider working with Paul Vallee and the team at Pythian. Pythian looks for the best people from their respective levels of technology expertise, whether a college graduate or a 2 decade RDBMS veteran. This company has a great work …