Recap of Portland OpenSQL Camp 2009
I was at OpenSQL Camp 2009 in Portland last weekend. I thought the event was very well done. On Friday we had a pizza party at Old Town Pizza, which was awesome. Saturday and Sunday were breakfast, sessions, lunch (yum), and sessions and hacking. These were held at souk, a co-working space. After 5PM, people got together for dinner, beer, etc.
I presented on mk-query-digest — a live demo of features requested by the audience. Sessions from others that I thought were particularly good included ones on CouchDB and MongoDB. I mixed up the time and missed the session from Tokutek on how fractal tree indexes work. I’ll try to watch the video if that one was taped.
During the hackathons, Daniel and I worked on Maatkit. We are laying groundwork for a more powerful mk-query-digest.
As you may know, I created OpenSQL Camp. But I was not involved in organizing this or the previous event in Germany, which I think is great. I talked briefly with Eric and Selena about seeing if we could put together a recipe to make the process easy for folks to organize their own. We should be able to lay out checklists and timelines of major things — location, shirts, sponsorship, budgeting, food. Eric and Selena got great food, much better than the Panera catering I had for the first event. Those kinds of decisions and results should be recorded. It would be great to be able to treat it like a franchise so anyone could just add water and make their own.
I also might be willing to help organize another on the East Coast, perhaps as soon as next year if I can reduce my workload enough to have the time. I’d probably want to do something in or near Washington DC, which is a more convenient location with better public transport than my hometown of Charlottesville.
It all started out as a response to complaints about MySQL’s annual conference not being a user’s conference, but nobody actually doing anything about it. I decided to do something about it, in a more inclusive way. And judging by the attendees and talks at the two I’ve gone to, people were happy to say yes to that. I think if there are continued events, that’s the ultimate measure of success.
Further Reading:
Someone at opensql camp said there is an inverse relationship between the cost of a mysql conference and the quality of that conference. I couldn’t agree more.
Rehan
18 Nov 09 at 12:36 pm
Baron,
I mentioned to several people that Boston next year is a very good possibility. The Pythian office in Boston is actually big enough for the event, and there are plenty of other spaces around the Boston area as well. In case you’ve forgotten, I also helped found OpenSQLCamp, and have helped out with all 3 of them. I’m pretty quiet about it, but I do have information about when things were done for all three conferences.
In fact, we used a lot of information from the 1st OpenSQLCamp in planning this one — particularly about quantities of food.
Sheeri K. Cabral
18 Nov 09 at 3:38 pm
I hadn’t thought about Boston. Sounds good to me. We should bring it up on the mailing list when the time is right. I’m 100% happy to just attend and not organize if others are willing to do it!
Xaprb
18 Nov 09 at 3:57 pm
One benefit of OpenSQL camp (the first one that I went to, in Virginia) was that it was a lot more intimate – very much as if a group of people had run off camping to talk databases.
The MySQL UC has a much different feel…. approaching a bit more of a firehose, and perhaps at different audiences…. I certainly wouldn’t be doing a 6-8hr NDB tutorial at OpenSQL Camp :)
But I’ve also never been an end user at a MySQL UC, always a developer *of* MySQL related things.
But missing Portland OpenSQL camp is certainly the most missed event this year for me…. perhaps I need to organise an Australian one :)
Stewart Smith
19 Nov 09 at 3:53 am
[...] Not that PASS was the only game in town. Just down the coast a bit, Baron Schwartz gives his recap of Portland OpenSQL Camp 2009. [...]
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20 Nov 09 at 1:45 pm