Open Query

Welcome to Open Query's newsletter, containing our training schedule for the upcoming months, other related news, and tips. This edition is mainly focused on training, with a lot of new course modules available, in more cities.

Training for MySQL

In the upcoming months (mid August to early November), we have MySQL course days for both Developers and DBAs scheduled in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Auckland. As always, you can sign up for individual days, depending on your current needs and budget. Open Query develops its own materials, always relevant and up to date. There are discounts for early bookings.

To view the full schedule, see http://openquery.com.au/training/schedule

Developer topics:
- MySQL Optimisation by Design
- MySQL Storage Engine Optimisation
- MySQL 5.0 Upgrade and Advanced Features

DBA topics:
- MySQL Installation, Security and User Management
- MySQL Backup and Recovery
- MySQL Storage Engine Optimisation
- InnoDB Performance Tuning

High Availability and Scale-Out:
- MySQL Scaling and High Availability Solutions
- DRBD and Heartbeat for MySQL Workshop
- MySQL Replication Workshop

For bookings and questions, contact us! http://openquery.com.au/training/contact

Quality Assurance in PHP Projects

You may have read about Test Driven Development, and tools such as PHPUnit and Selenium? Open Query has invited PHPUnit author Sebastian Bergmann to come over to Australia and teach a 3-day workshop on this topic. The workshops are scheduled in August in Melbourne and Brisbane. At this point there are just a few seats left.

For more detail and bookings, see http://openquery.com.au/training/php_project_qa

In-House (Custom) Training

We're seeing a lot of interest in custom training, sometimes off-site but generally at a client's own premises. Custom training allows the training to be tailored to your specific use of MySQL, and have more people benefit at a reduced cost. The base price is $2500 per day + GST, with up to 12 participants. Essentially you hire an expert trainer for one or more days, and the exact content is open - naturally most of it can be agreed upon beforehand, and corresponding materials will be provided.

For more details, see http://openquery.com.au/training/custom

Students and Educators

Open Query appreciates the budget constraints of students and educational institutions, so we offer a very special rate to students and educators. The per-day course fee can be as low as $50 without cutting anything from the training experience; even lunch is included, just like normal!

For more details, see http://openquery.com.au/training/academic

Book: High Performance MySQL

Open Query's own Arjen Lentz co-authored - together with Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev and Vadim Tkachenko - the 2nd edition of one of the most popular books on MySQL. Mark Callaghan of the HA MySQL blog and Google fame has declared this edition to be "the best MySQL book ever". That's pretty cool! The book is available from your local book stores including Dymocks, Angus & Robertson, Borders, and so on. However, ordering from Amazon in the US may still be cheapest.

For more info and an Amazon link, see http://openquery.com.au/resources/hpm

What's in a Name?

Quite a lot, really. And for you, possibly a free training day! We would like you to come up with a good name for the Open Query newsletter, and the winner will be able to attend one day course module absolutely free.

Please send your suggestion through http://openquery.com.au/contact

Tip: Temporary Tables and Default Storage Engine

In this section of the newsletter, Open Query gives away a free gem. We're happy to share what we know, those of you who have already attended our training know that it's much more than a collection of hints or a reiteration of what's in the manual! So, with that noted, did you know the following:

MySQL Server sometimes needs to create a temporary table during execution of a query, in order to hold an intermediate result. Normally those tables use the MEMORY engine, unless the data contains TEXT or BLOB type columns, or is too large.

On most systems, the table is then automatically converted to MyISAM, and will reside on disk (in tmpdir). However, the server actually converts to whatever the default storage engine is, and thus we can make use of this! By setting this default to InnoDB (storage-engine=InnoDB in my.cnf) only the table structure information will be written to disk, the rest will only reside in memory (given sufficient space in the InnoDB buffer pool) since it's never committed.

The result is almost no disk I/O, and that is, of course, excellent for performance!

Newsletter Subscriptions

You will shortly be able to control your newsletter subscription through the Open Query website at http://openquery.com.au/, and people who have been to one or more training days will also gain access to the special Alumni pages which include course materials and other information. Please login or register today! On the site will also find an increasing number of resources and links which you may find useful.

If you want to no longer receive this newsletter or other communications from Open Query (we do try to limit this to the absolute minimum actually, which is exactly why we're starting the newsletter so that all info is neatly rolled into one email), just let us know and we will honour your request.

Also, any suggestions or feedback about the newsletter are most welcome!

You can always contact Open Query via http://openquery.com.au/contact