Posted on 4 Comments

MySQL User Groups & MySQL 5.0 topics

I was at the local MySQL Users Group in my home town Brisbane. I set it up last year and we’ve had a meeting every month since… it’s slowly growing, 44 members already and one or two new people joining each week.

User Groups appear to always struggle with meeting venues, and of course many meetup groups actually meet at cafes. We’ve tried that, but it’s just too noisy, the table layout is not helpful for everybody following a conversation, and actual presentations (let alone with a projector) are impossible. Of course there are exceptions, I know that some cafes/restaurants have a back room with nice facilities (which you often get for low cost or even free, provided that the people eat/drink enough 😉
In Brisbane, a few members have offered their offices. Through Scott McClintock we first held the meetings at NetOptions, in a very nice boardroom. We did move to Knowledge Net Design (Jason Hawkins) as that location is easier to get to, both by car and public transport.

Jason actually also takes care of the talk selections and guiding the meetings (I was away last month anyway, with the baby arriving). Of course we have the slight advantage of having two MySQL employees in Brisbane, Jon Stephens (technical writers for the Docs team, and author of various books) and myself. I generally give a quick update on the latest MySQL news at a meeting, but most months one of the other people actually takes care of the main talk.

We have had several people talk about their own (relatively small) apps or installations; interesting? Yes! There are always aspects of their implementation that are insightful for other users, and/or trigger a followup conversation. This month, Matthew Setter presented a talk on MS SQL Server vs MySQL 5.0, comparing the main business and technical features, and discussing practical and technical issues that should be kept in mind when considering a migration. It was pretty well balanced and insightful. It never makes sense to blindly push forward with migration ideas. As Matthew identified quite correctly, many different issues need to be considered, and a feature comparison (relative to the application’s needs) is actually but a minor part of it all.

By the way, we have our meetings on the 1st Tuesday of each month. This appears to work better than a Monday, at least around here – for those with families, many sports things have training on Monday; Fridays too are nasty. Tuesday turns out to be the best pick. Do consider this when organizing your local meeting. I know that meetup defaults MySQL groups to the 1st Monday of the month, but you can change it – and after the one time, the system remembers so that it will stick to whatever day you picked.

I hope you find the above info useful… please feel free to send me ideas and/or questions about user groups!

Posted on 4 Comments

4 thoughts on “MySQL User Groups & MySQL 5.0 topics

  1. Are the slides for the “MS SQL Server vs MySQL 5.0” talk available online? I could have used them last week while giving an In-House training.

  2. They’re not. I reckon they would need some tweaking before they can be used generically. Also, they merely illustrate – they are not the talk. I’ll see about more talk resources. Already though, take a peek at for instance mysqluc.com where nearly all the slides from the MySQL Users Conference 2005 are made available. There were several migration talks there as well.

  3. Hi there Arjen,

    I just found your article again. would you be interested in me re-building the slides and accompanying documentation?

    Matt

  4. Sure.

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