If you’re like me and are a DBA in the UK with a penchant for MySQL or Oracle, you’ll know we have a smörgåsbord of conferences here next week. We’ve been waiting, and like buses two have come at once. We have the UK Oracle User Group Conference 2012, in Birmingham on 3rd – 5th [...]

Andrew Moore and Ben Mildren return from Ottawa to Bristol to London all in the name of MySQL

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly round up of news and happenings in the database world.

We’re planning our publishing calendar for 2011. Happy to announce that we’ll have a few guest hosts in the New Year. Don’t forget if you’d like to host or edit a future edition of Log Buffer on your own blog, send a note to the Log Buffer coordinator.

We’ve had several contributions of favorite reads from the team this week. Enjoy this issue, Log Buffer #208.

Gwen Shapira’s picks:

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Welcome to the 160th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

MySQL

Blame it on MyISAM, says Mark Callaghan of High Availability MySQL, on considering sql_mode and type coercion. “I think that MyISAM has its place,” writes Mark. “It does fast table scans, but InnoDB is much faster on just about everything else. I am just not thrilled with the impact it has had on MySQL.”

Not that those other engines are without flaw. Peter Zaitsev reports on an InnoDB performance gotcha with larger queries.

Here on the …

OpenSQLCamp 2009 is happening “in parallel to the Free and Open Source Conference 2009 (FrOSCon) on Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd August in St. Augustin, Germany …. close to Bonn and Cologne.”

I plan on being at FrOSCon and OpenSQLCamp. Where I go before and after that is up to *you*. Yes, that is right, perhaps I will visit a user group, such as France’s MySQL User Group. Or perhaps your company needs the type of services Pythian can offer — we can do the “traditional consulting” model where we look over your systems for performance tuning and security gains, or fix problems in an emergency. Even more of a win, we specialize in recurring engineering — we can supplement your existing IT staff with database expertise, and do all the database work your current …

If so, you should check out OpenSQLCamp 2009, European Edition. November last year, the home of OpenSQL Camp was Charlottesville, VA, but now it is time to have something a bit more local. OpenSQL Camp will take place Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd of August, in St. Augustin, Germany, so it could do for a nice August getaway to Germany.

It’s not really the biggest of cities, but then again, that is part of the charm, going to some small city and learning more about databases.
In case you do happen to be curious, feel free to check out the list of proposed sessions, although it is not complete, it does give a overview of what to expect.

I for one am looking forward to a European event, as it seems like most things is based in the US, and that means travel time will be less and no …

The Malta MySQL User Group (MMUG) met for the second time this Thursday, and compared to last time, we had a much better venue: Ixaris Systems let us use their board room, so we had all the tools we needed to have a good meeting.

We managed to get a group picture before everyone has arrived, so I guess we can call the people in this picture “early birds”.

Once we all arrived, however, Sandro Gauci from EnableSecurity gave us a very interesting talk on SQL Injection security, and general security flaws from a developer point a view. You can find the slides here: sql-injection.pdf.

Here’s a picture of Mr. Gauci while presenting. (Sorry for the obvious problem with the over-white picture — seems like I …

So, we’re coming up on that time again. When I moved back to Malta in order to work for Pythian one of the things that I wanted to do was to involve myself more in the community. Currently, I’m doing this by trying to keep an active blog with tips and tricks, good standard knowledge, and just overall trying to enlighten people. I’m also doing this by organizing a MySQL User Group here in Malta.

We’re set to have our 2nd meeting this coming Thursday, the 28thof August, in Ta’ Xbiex where we have graciously been donated a board room and projector (and parking space, luckily) for use. I’m trying to get one of our members to give a session about security (not only on MySQL, but also on the OS level to secure the process), and I know there is work being done on a presentation on MySQL Cluster, which I personally find …

I am traveling to Europe next week to brief major prospects in Germany (Daimler, MAN) as well as to attend to administrative matters at Pythian Europe in Prague and would love to meet any readers of this blog during this trip!

I’m especially interested in meeting:

• DBAs, Applications Administrators and Systems Administrators,
• Potential customers (IT Directors, DBA Managers, Supply Managers for IT), and
• Potential partners (IT product of service companies that could partner with Pythian to delight our mutual customers)

Here is my itinerary:

• Sunday, August: Frankfurt,
• Monday, August 4: Stuttgart,
• Tuesday, August 5: Munich, and
• Wednesday, August 6 through Saturday, August 9: Prague, Czech Republic.

Please reach out to me using vallee@pythian.com if you would like to meet!

So, the Malta MySQL User Group has had its first ever meet-up today, and it was a success! When organizing it, I had no clue how many people would show up, people have said “yes” and then changed to “no”, and vice versa.

Anyway, so the morning came, and I sent out a few confirmation emails, and it suddenly dropped down to just three of us, which was a shame. Anyway, around 5pm, I noticed that there was four more that had just said they wanted to attend. Unfortunately, one of those dropped out, but it was still a great turnout.

This is a great opportunity for us to promote MySQL use in Malta, as well as share experience and knowledge. Also just to network a bit.

So, this time, for meeting #1, we met up outside a local bank, and walked to Il-Mithna, which is a local restaurant. In this picture, there is the first core group of local user group members, all happily gathered and just about to start our discussions. …