Posted on 4 Comments

First week flying solo

Ok, so the week is not over yet – but I have to name these entries somehow 😉
And it’s actually “solo again” as I used to run my own business back when I lived in The Netherlands.
Anyway… the first week at Open Query.

First booked customer?
Training. Multiple people, multiple modules. Good.

First consulting customer?
A referral – thanks Steve!
Environment: Windows (someone up there must hate me ;-), or actually a Microsoft shop (including MS-SQL) that happens to have one app on MySQL. Actually, the fact that this server runs Windows actually matters very little. But it *was* interesting to hear this fellow speak about MS-SQL and compare some things.

Microsoft SQL Server has a nice GUI for maintenance, you set up some stuff and schedule other regular things. MySQL Administrator can do some of that (and looks very decent) but I appreciate that the Microsoft GUI is probably more slick. Microsoft is just very good at those things.

Then he was saying that they don’t worry about how Microsoft SQL handles things internally, they just chuck queries at it. And that he found that MySQL was blazingly fast and probably knocked the socks off Microsoft SQL for most stuff (his words, not mine). This of course while we were discussing some particularly slow queries, in the context of which I explained why they were slow (clarifying internal logic, essentially).
Now, I’d figure that if you’d take into account how Microsoft SQL handles stuff internally, you can probably improve performance just like you can with MySQL. Perhaps not as much, but still… there must be some in it. Ohwell, that’s not my gig.

It’s also very nice to be called a guru 😉 I know I’m not, really – but at least I know many of those who are the real gurus on the various topics (and not even all of them work at mysql.com 😉
I’m having fun.

By the way, for the curious, both abovementioned customers were within Australia – got others outside too. It’s inevitable.

Posted on 4 Comments

4 thoughts on “First week flying solo

  1. Guru is relative. You definitely qualify compared to most people your customers will meet.

    If you think about all of the countries in the world, with the exception of a few, you (or I or others) would be the national expert in MySQL and its performance if you moved there. That’s surely guru-worthy.

  2. Awesome to hear. Good luck, Arjen.

  3. Don’t sell yourself short — you know a LOT! Maybe not everything, sure, but you’re definitely in the upper echelons.

    And congrats! Let’s hope each week is a good week.

  4. Best of luck Arjen, I’m sure you will do well. You taught me a number of things in MySQL, help very much appreciated.

    I understand the Windows environment comment, it’s still very foreign to me. In a recent MySQL for Oracle DBA presentation with 100 people, only one person used Windows in Production.

    Ronald

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