Well, nobody from Sun showed up in person, but we got a great rendition of "Where were you when you heard THE NEWS that Sun bought MySQL?" from Mark Rubin, the MySQL Sales Engineer for the New England area, and from Giuseppe Maxia, who revealed something very interesting and riveting.
From there, Giuseppe gave a short talk on what it's like to work at MySQL, and then we moved on to the topic of the user group meeting, "What is MySQL Cluster Good For?"
Patrick Galbraith, former MySQL employee who helped write replication, came to the November 2007 Boston MySQL User Group and did a fantastic presentation on replication, including showing how to set up replication and walking us through the steps in real-time, setting up an example server.
References mentioned in the video:
Brian Aker's DBIx::Password
Giuseppe Maxia's article about federated tables -- I think that's the right one, feel free to comment if it's not.
Google Proto Buffers: The Benefits of Managed Messaging by Jay Pipes
This session will reveal how Drizzle is benefiting from replacing a lot of MySQL's custom code with Google's Protocol Buffers. Jay is a developer for the Drizzle project.
Kelly implemented reporting and history-tracking extensions in Postgres. It keeps track of any changes to the system. This has been valuable in letting clients know what happened to their data, where bugs were happening in the system and generally saving our butts. The reporting system takes changes made in a attribute style table structure and arranges them in a standard table type structure for reporting. Kelly will explain why this system was built and how, including limitations of Postgres that had to be accommodated, and an introduction to writin