Back

"Next stop Old Greenwich, then we're in Stamford. Wouldn't want you to be sleeping. The station yard is has scary stuff, big rats. The yardmaster makes terrible carvings."

With these surreal words the conductor shook me awoke. I was totally passed out on the metronorth train, something I'm normally not able to do. That's an exact quote, as least as well as I can remember it.

Almost everything that could go wrong on the trip back did and I'm glad to be home.

I met lots of database luminaries this weekend, the guy who founded MySQL, the guy who founded SQLite, the guy who invented BLOBs, and pretty much everyone who's ever written a book about MySQL. I learned all sorts of esoteric knowledge. I'm eager to see the videos of the sessions in other tracks I missed.  Monty seemed pleased that I seemed to like the strange scandinavian fish-flavored drink he tried to make everyone try after the sessions ended on Saturday.

Jay Pipes

Jay's presentation was by far the most informative. I pinned him down afterward and asked him a bunch of questions.

I'll transcribe my notes later.

memcached msql UDFs

Patrick Galbraith has just given an intriguing talk on his memcached functions for mysql. This allows you to work with memcached seamlessly via triggers on mysql objects.

Meanwhile, Aker is talking about gearman, an open source messaging system

SQLite

Dr. Richard Hipp: "We're not trying to compete with MySQL, we're trying to compete with fopen()"

SQLite is intended for managing disk access for a single application.

Charlottesville

Charlottesville is a cute little down, with an extensive red brick pedestrian arcade. It actually has a European feel to it. I was expecting a fork in the road with two sticks stuck in the ground and the conference would take place around there.

I was expecting to see drunken rednecks, and while I have seen a few of those, there are a lot of hippies selling whatever on the street and hipsters as well. There seems to be hipsters everywhere you go, whether it be New York, Virginia, Thailand, Japan, all with their black-rimmed glasses and v-neck sweaters listening to Nirvana. There must be some pan-hipster consciousness, weaving all of the threads of humanity together.

Everyone is extremely friendly, people smile at you, wave at you when you walk by. The waitress at breakfast called me "sweetie".

Thanks to our MySQL contact, last night I had dinner with some MySQL top guns at a "Himalayan" restaurant -- I sat next to Monty, and Aker was a few seats away.

Aker's just finished his keynote, and a Postgres guy is giving a talk on concurrency.