At the MySQL Conference, I had the chance to interview Rohit Nadhani, founder of Webyog, the folk that make SQLyog and MONyog. Watch the video, for more.

Generally based out of Bangalore (I visited them when I was last there), Webyog just started an office in Santa Clara, and are expanding. They boast 15,000 paid customers so far, with some big name customers: Google, Yahoo!, executive office to the US president, and more.

SQLyog is termed as an upgrade from phpMyAdmin. There is a GPL community edition, with some “power tools” that is part of the Enterprise Edition. It is very Win32 based, but easy enough to run on other OSes via WINE or some sort of virtualisation tool.

MONyog is an agentless monitoring tool. It …

While at the MySQL Conference, I caught up with Barry Abrahamson, the systems wrangler/de-facto DBA behind Wordpress.com (and all other Automattic properties). Watch the video.

You probably already know that Wordpress itself is built on top of MySQL. And despite everything you might have heard about our (MySQL/Sun’s) new founders, Wordpress is MySQL today, and for the foreseeable future. Anyway, I digress.

Wordpress.com has about 70 million tables, and tens of thousands of blogs. Large amount of tables, serve for easy sharding - …

I caught up with Marc Delisle (we have a relatively old interview with him on the MySQL DevZone) recently, and got him to give us an introduction to phpMyAdmin, the several books he’s written, and how the project gets new features from the Google Summer of Code. What’s really impressive? They continue winning awards (Marc won one from MySQL in 2009 as well!), and have a user base of nearly 18.5 million (this is downloads — not just users, considering how common it is in shared hosting environments). Watch the video for more.

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I caught up with Zach Skyles Owens, a PHP Evangelist at Microsoft. If you missed the embed, watch the video. I have some sparse notes below.

I learned some new things:

• Microsoft spends time working with the PHP community
• They are porting applications to work with an SQL Server backend
• They are ensuring that the language should “just work”, with the IIS and SQL Server stack. This is quite different from the usual AMP (Apache = server, MySQL = database, PHP = language) stack that we’re quite accustomed to.
• There is a Microsoft Web Platform, and there’s a Web Application Gallery, that brings in …

I had the pleasure of having a quick video interview with Chuck Hagenbuch and Leigh Heyman, both from Blue State Digital, and people that helped run the my.barackobama.com campaign. They’re giving the closing keynote at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 alongside three engineers from Google, and its going to be great.

If you missed the embed, here’s the video. Don’t forget to see them, at their closing keynote titled Database We Can Believe In: Stories from the Front Lines (and Server Rooms) of Barack Obama’s Online Presidential Campaign.

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While Zack covered the storage engine and appliances sessions pretty well, I feel he’s missed out on a few important new engines (or engine related talks):

• DDEngine will be represented, speaking about Automated data versioning with a storage engine
• Long time MySQL Community Member Beat Vontobel, will be presenting on the SeqEngine, in Solving Common SQL Problems with the SeqEngine
• Kazuho Oku, from Cybozu Labs in Japan, will be talking about Q4M, a queuing engine for MySQL. Mixi.jp uses it for their Twitter like service, so I’d …

This is a “first-timer’s” guide to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009. It is by no means official, but are things I think are somewhat important. Its broken down into sections: What days to attend, What to bring, Laptop, Blogging, Twittering, etc…, Be Social, The Attendee Directory, Evenings, and Did I miss something? Its long, but do bear with me — its just some friendly advice after attending this conference for quite the number of years.

What days to attend

The conference runs from Monday to Thursday. Monday is tutorial day, and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are days where you have the conference proper.

Tuesday and Wednesday are days the Expo Hall is open. Go there, visit the place, learn about the ecosystem, and probably walk away with goodies while you’re at it. Don’t forget the DotOrg Pavilion, as there are plenty of open source …

Coming to the Hyatt Santa Clara, for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009? Beware, that this year, the in-room Internet just isn’t so peachy.

When you check in, there’s this option of a “Business Plan” that Hyatt sells you - USD$30, for free wired in-room Internet (a $12.95/day value), free breakfast (this includes 15% gratuity, so a $20+ value), a free bottle of water (yes, otherwise its $3.95), and all the local and long distance calls in the US that you’ll need (depending on what you do, YMMV). It seemed like a good deal.

Now, for the benefit of others, which has taken about four days for me to fix. When you’re on this plan, the Hyatt rebates your Internet within an hour or so of you signing up for the deal. This tells their ISP that you’re now not able to get access to anything else, but Port 80 and Port 443 access — yes, SMTP, IMAP, SSH, IRC and all …

Today I spoke with Farhan “Frank” Mashraqi, former Fotolog DBA, now working at a startup, NetEdge, working on social analytics. He’s talking about the two sessions he’s giving next week at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, as well as the benefits of being at the MySQL Conference & Expo.

He’s giving two talks:

1. Hadoop and MySQL: Friends with Benefits in where he will tell you about how you can combine data sets and queries, some of which run on Hadoop, and others which run on MySQL, but eventually probably end up in MySQL (he works on this cool stuff at NetEdge, the startup he’s currently attached …

I heard about TwitterJobSearch on net@night, and decided to give it a twirl. I typed “mysql” and found 3,092 results in 30 seconds. You can then filter by job title, salary, skill set, job type, and more, as well as sort it by relevance or date.

Useful? Quite possibly. Would be more useful, if you could filter out Twitter users (like @itcareer, for example). Search that is semantic, instead of just word based. So “mysql in san francisco” will return relevant results for you.

If you’re looking for a job anytime soon, note that there will also be a Job Fair at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, happening April 20-23 2009, are you registered yet? Its a great place to network, and you shouldn’t miss it.

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