If you are in San Francisco on October 27, 2015, please come along to our MySQL team reception at Jillian’s at Metreon. You do not require an Oracle OpenWorld pass to attend, all we ask is that you please register in advance.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Last week marked my first April-MySQL-Conf since 2009, and now that I'm back home I wanted to reflect on some of my personal highlights.

Photo Credit: @miguel2angel

• Tomas' keynote on Wednesday morning was awesome. It felt great to be part of the team at Oracle that announced a release 2x faster than MySQL 5.6 and 3x faster than MySQL 5.5. The Parser+Optimizer+InnoDB GIS labs release is also a great sign of things to come.
• Hosting the meet the MySQL team @ Oracle BOF Wednesday night, and answering community questions with my colleagues on our engineering …

As mentioned in my recent MySQL Performance Blog interview, Oracle has a number of vacancies in the MySQL team. By my count, there are 21 current vacancies:

• IRC2431754
  Software Developer 4
  MySQL Server Development (Windows)
• IRC2433642
  Software Developer 4
  MySQL Server Development (Replication)
• IRC2435607
  Internet Sales Representative II
  MySQL Corporate Sales
• IRC2437590
  Software Developer 3
  MySQL Enterprise Tools
• IRC2423566
  Technology Sales Representative III
  MySQL Sales
• IRC2421573
  Technical Analyst 3-Support
  MySQL Support
• IRC2409719
  Sales Consultant
  MySQL Global Business Unit
…

I’ve just finishing converting my blog from Jekyll to WordPress.

There were a couple of features I was looking for (such as being able to schedule upcoming posts), but the real reason is that I want to be able to use MySQL 5.7 DMR3 against a tool that I interact with almost every day.

Or as this is more informally known, I wanted to eat my own dogfood:

I now have:

• WordPress 3.8.1
• MySQL 5.7 DMR3
• sql_mode=NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES
• All InnoDB Storage Engine
• Disqus comment engine (comment if you think this is cheating)
• “Markdown on Save Improved” plugin.

I apologize for broken images and URLs changing slightly (which will …

I’m back home in Toronto, after having spent part of last week in Washington DC meeting Oracle’s Federal MySQL users.

I think generally speaking when you look at buzzwords in the startup scene, there is a filter as to what bubbles up into the more conservative enterprise and public sector.

My impression was that there is some interest in big-data, but there is absolutely phenomenal interest in cloud computing. This was a real take away for me, and next time I plan to talk more about the MySQL utilities and MySQL Fabric.

There were two side discussions that affected a number of users that I wanted to follow up with here:

• When upgrading from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6, secure-auth is enabled by default. This incompatible change is unfortunate, but was required to improve MySQL’s password hashing strength. My …