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MySQL Users Group Brisbane – cake, certification, and talks


Yesterday evening was the monthly meeting of our local MySQL Users Group in Brisbane. What do we get up to at these meetings?

  • Well, there’s always a few new people, so we first do an intro round. With the group growing nicely, we now try to have
  • I’ve asked Jason Hawkins, who also provides the meeting facilities, to be be the chairperson. So he keeps things on track (while still keeping things informal).
  • Next, we cover the latest MySQL related news, and have a general Q&A round. The big news was of course the production release of MySQL 5.0! To celebrate the occasion, I brought the nice five-dot-oh chocolate cake you see above. Yummy!
  • Timothy Hitchens did the main talk this time, about managing files (such as images) inside a database and the various issues involved with that. Usually a presentation+questions, or a discussion, takes about an hour. The whole meeting generally is about 2 hours long.
  • There were some questions about differences between storage engines, so I did an overview of that with scribbles on the whiteboard.
  • Stewart Smith, one of our cluster developers, was up from Melbourne and he answered some questions about MySQL Cluster.

Next month, before the main meeting, about 10 of the UG members will sit for MySQL Certification tests. Usually you go to a local VUE test center near you, but we can also do paper-based exams provided there’s a proctor present (that’d be me). The advantage of that is that it can be done at a lower cost for everybody. So it’s a great thing to do with a local users group!

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