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Teaching at University of Queensland, and filling in the MySQL knowledge gaps

I like to say it that way 😉 but to clarify I’m doing in-house training days in MySQL related topics for staff members of various UQ departments. Nice people, interesting backgrounds and ongoing projects, and it is of course in my home town Brisbane so nice and easy after all the recent travels far & wide.

We’re covering everything from SQL Fundamentals to DBA and performance tuning foo, spread out over many days in the coming months. Some of the days are newly developed, such as the SQL Fundamentals module. So now it can be added to OQ’s range of available course topics!

People have asked me why I started out with intermediate and somewhat advanced course days, and then extended that mainly sideways and “backwards” (down to beginner level), and only a little bit upward.
There’s some very practical reasons for this. A beginner obviously won’t have been involved with MySQL before, and that means they haven’t been around in the MySQL (or even OSS) ecosystem. How would they find Open Query, or how would I find them? Of course it happens, and Google is great too, but relying on this is possibly not the best way for a startup.

MySQL users with at least some experience are much easier to “catch”, and thus are a better place to start; at least, that’s what I figured, and it’s proven effective. Then, the rest is expansion from there. And as it turned out, I now get lots of beginner-level requests also, and SQL Fundamental is the absolute genesis.

Then the advanced foo… of course we need to deal with topics like nifty replication and failover techniques, and server performance analysis and tuning. So OQ has course days for those topics, and offers remote and on-site consulting services as well. But when it comes to scaling, we know that getting the schema and queries right is much more effective than fancy hardware. Even experienced MySQL developers and DBAs tend to have plenty of “gaps” in their knowledge, and it’s exactly those gaps (well, the filler 😉 that can make the biggest difference. We really do need to deal with all that before indulging in for instance sharding techniques.

The tricky bit is to “convince” someone that they don’t actually know as much as they need on the level they reckon they are – but it’s not a battle, or about putting people down, the purpose is to help them find those little bits that they’ve been missing, so that they can truly do magic in their realm. Heck, I don’t know everything either, and I learn more new things all the time!

So how do we sell the “you’re advanced but you still need to learn some more more stuff also” story? Look, let that be my little marketing secret… and there too there’s plenty more to figure out along the way. A key advantage for OQ is that we have a low overhead infrastructure, we can explore something and not end up in deep trouble if it doesn’t work out, and we never spend money we don’t have. All those handy things are not something I invented, it’s basic “Bootstrapping” stuff (see the book by the same title by Greg Gianforte of RightNow Technologies, another very successful MySQL user), aka “starting a business with almost no money”.
It works, it’s exciting and IMHO a more enjoyable way for building a business, and it also makes for great conference talk topics!

The bank still reckons Open Query and its founder are a bit weird just bringing them money (in general terms) and in any case not wanting or needing to borrow anything, but by now they’ve noticed that it’s going alright with the incomings and outgoings. That gives me a lot of good karma with the bank, and that’s just a nice feeling to have. Try it! And when I want to buy a house again some time, having that good “history” will come in handy, although fundamentally I just dislike borrowing and would love to just be able to buy a place outright; might not quite happen that way though 😉
I am with a fairly big bank, but one where you can actually know the bank manager and even have their mobile number. When I walk in to the branch I can just walk up to his office and then it’s “hi Arjen, do come in”. He does that with heaps of people so that’s not just me and not really about the way I’ve set up my business – but it’s great anyway, and sometimes extremely useful.

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2 thoughts on “Teaching at University of Queensland, and filling in the MySQL knowledge gaps

  1. That’s an excellent gig. Congratulations on the good work!

  2. I still miss taking a nap on the lawn between classes. It’s probably good weather for it now too.

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