Xaprb

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.

I’ve bought my plane tickets for OpenSQL Camp US 2009, in Portland, Oregon on the weekend of November 14th. I’m really looking forward to the event and seeing friends again. And I’m psyched that the third incarnation of this event is taking place! I wish I could have been at the 2nd one too, earlier this year in Europe.

There are two OpenSQL Camp events in 2009. This is a conference about any and all open-source databases. The slogan of the inaugural event was “of, by, and for the community.”

The first of this year’s events just ended last weekend in Germany, and I’m really sad that neither I nor anyone else from Percona could attend. But fortunately the amazing crew of organizers has already posted videos of the sessions!

The other is upcoming in November in Portland, Oregon USA. I am going to try to attend this one. I encourage you to not only attend, but to participate in planning this event. Thus far in its short life, the OpenSQL Camp conference series has been entirely a grassroots effort. You can be part of that.

I also see that the call for proposals for PostgreSQL West 2009 is still open for a few more days. I just wish I could attend all these conferences. Especially if you’re near the west coast of the USA, I encourage you to attend this event — I went to East 2008 and East 2009, and they were really worth it.