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Interactive Online Training for MySQL and MariaDB

Because interactivity with the trainer (our classes are not dry lectures) and discussions are an important and intrinsic part of our teaching approach, we’ve long tracked development of technologies for online training, but previously were not satisfied.

High costs of various corporate offerings would negatively impact our pricing, given the relatively small scale use and our purposely small classes. The student system requirements would often be problematic – obviously students use different operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux) and we cannot prescribe that people use a particular OS.

Big Blue Button has long looked like it had the right potential, and it’s now developed to a point where were happy with it. For more tech and practical details, see our Interactive Online Training page.

After our successful trial runs, we have the following course modules scheduled in the next few weeks, others to follow soon:

The date ranges may appear a tad odd at first, but what we do is run each original day-module across two sessions over two days, in this case noon-3.30pm Sydney time. An online session has three 10 minute breaks.

As you can also see the pricing is pretty neat – we can do that since we control the infrastructure and obviously don’t have trainer travel, venue and catering to worry about. No travel hassles for you, either! You should find a quiet spot and try and not get interrupted.

All the interactivity, discussion and hands-on work is there as normal, Open Query provides the VMs – and students (and trainer) can access each other’s session, where needed. We’re pretty pleased with the set up.

Naturally we can also do custom training in this format – we do still offer on-site training as well.

For bookings, or if you’d like more information or have other questions, contact us today!

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Open Query training at Drupal DownUnder 2012

DrupalDownUnder 2012 will be held in Melbourne Australia 13-15 January. A great event, I’ve been to several of its predecessors. People there don’t care an awful lot for databases, but they do realise that sometimes it’s important to either learn more about it or talk to someone specialised in that field. And when discussing general infrastructure, resilience is quite relevant. Clients want a site to remain up, but keep costs low.

I will teach pre-conference training sessions on the Friday at DDU:

The material is made specific to Drupal developers and users. The query design skills, for instance, will help you with module development and designing Drupal Views. The two half-days can also be booked as a MySQL Training Pack for $395.

On Saturday afternoon in the main conference, I have a session Scaling out your Drupal and Database Infrastructure, Affordably covering the topics of resilience, ease of maintenance, and scaling.

I’m honoured to have been selected to do these sessions, I know there were plenty of submissions from excellent speakers. As with all Drupal conferences, attendees also vote on which submissions they would like to see.

After DDU I’m travelling on to Ballarat for LinuxConfAU 2012, where I’m not speaking in the main program this year, but will have sessions in the “High Availability and Storage” and “Business of Open Source” miniconfs. I’ll do another post on the former – the latter is not related to Open Query.

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New Open Query training days in Australia

The favourite Open Query course modules as well as reworked and brand new ones, with November/December 2009 dates for Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne listed below. You can register for days/modules individually, to suit your time, budget and current needs. Your trainers are Sean, Ray and Arjen (see OQ people).

For the Canberra and Melbourne days which are DBA/HA, registrations for all of the modules in a series before 15 October will receive a copy of the “High Performance MySQL” book (normal bookstore price is AUD 105).

Canberra

Sydney

Brisbane

  • Thu 19 Nov: MySQL Query Performance Optimisation and Tuning
  • Fri 20 Nov: MySQL Server Performance Optimisation and Tuning

Melbourne

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Open Database Alliance

This alliance is an excellent step, showing the maturity, breadth and depth of expertise for MySQL related services! Of course Open Query is an active early member, with our training and subscription services, and initiatives like the OurDelta builds project.

Kudos to MontyW and PeterZ for driving this further while at the MySQL Conference last month.

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Visiting Darwin/NT

From this Tuesday 12 May until Sunday 17 May I’m going to be in Darwin (Northern Territory, Australia), teaching custom MySQL training days for a medical research institute.
DarLUG has been extinct for a while, but perhaps there are some local Linux/OSS people reading this? Please do drop me a line if you’d like to catch up while I’m there!
I’ve only flown through Darwin before, never visited/stayed… and I love the tropics (I lived in Cairns for a while) so this shall be a joyous few days! Oh the tough things we have to do in business. I’m also doing a day trip to Litchfield… Kakadu will have to wait until another time (perhaps with Phoebe) as I’m told it’s best visited over multiple days. It’s extra cool that this trip is happening this year since 2009 marks Charles Darwin‘s 200th birthday.
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