O'Reilly Media MySQL Conference

Even without deep technical knowledge or a fat Rolodex, you can be a community superhero. In this talk from the 2009 MySQL Conference, Sheeri Cabral, the 2007-2008 MySQL Advocate of the Year, shares some pointers on things anyone can do to help the technology and community of your favorite open source project.

As Business Intelligence becomes more and more popular as a way for companies to achieve an advantage, some companies ahead of the curve are adopting open source BI software. Analysts have not been positive in their predictions of open source use, but they may be mistaken. Mark Madsen describes the results of his study showing who is using open source BI software, why they're using it, and what the benefits are. His results indicate that while open source BI is not widely accepted yet, its users are just ahead of the curve.

MySQL is not quite ready to run enterprise scale Internet applications, but Mark Callaghan and the MySQL team at Google are working on addressing its shortcomings. In this presentation from the 2009 MySQL Conference, Callaghan describes some of the requirements that Google's scale creates, the improvements they have made to MySQL, and their open questions to guide future development.

In mid 2006, YouTube served approximately 100 million videos in a single day. To maintain a website of that scale, one would imagine YouTube has hundreds of DBAs. But in fact, there are just three people that make it all work. Paul Tuckfield, the MySQL DBA at YouTube shares horror stories about scalability at YouTube and how he coped with them to keep the show going everyday, while learning important lessons along the way.

LAMP applications have a firm foothold in e-commerce and social networking, and the value of information stored in those systems is surging. At the 2007 MySQL Conference, Chander Kant of Zmanda, talks about how his company is taking advantage of this growing economy.

Rasmus Lerdorf, the original creator of the PHP programming language says he isn't a real programmer. Lerdorf isn't passionate about programming if it doesn't solve his problem; he created PHP to solve his own set of problems. Hear the story of the evolution of PHP from being a purely procedural language to its current state of a full-fledged object oriented language, from its creator.

Guy Kawasaki has a long history working in technology, both in established companies and as an entrepreneur. He worked for Apple at the time of the development of the Macintosh and later returned as an Apple Fellow. In this keynote speech, he gives what he believes are the important stages towards successful innovation. He presents the steps in both a humorous and intelligent way, showing what companies must do to be successful.

The many software development communities that have surfaced over the years have started to see an increasing relevance of social issues around them. They are not just engineering activities but full-fledged social communities. In this talk, Bdale Garbee, the Linux CTO at HP, draws a parallel between real world social communities and open source software development communities revealing similarities in the evolution of both, the issues they're concerned with, from financial viability to gender issues, and the roles and responsibilities of their participants.

Rich in linguistic play and delivered with both wit and panache, Eben Moglen's talk is an intellectual delight. Beginning with a look at the history of memory from the public recording of England's 11th century Domesday Book, Moglen leads us through the private memory palaces of 14th and 15th centuries to the problems of privacy that started with photographic technology. Convincing us that we have willingly given away our data and that those who now possess it have the right to use it, Moglen proposes voluntary data collectives as the answer.

The mission of the non-profit One Laptop per Child association is to develop a low-cost laptop, a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children. Their goal is to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves. Michael Evans of Red Hat, discusses the project, and reviews Red Hat's role in the project and how important it is to design the machine with hardware and software developers together, always considering the needs of the young enduser.