At our MySQL Camp Jay and Brian pitted off in the Umbrella Joust. Not sure if there was a winner, or a looser, but in the end no blood was split (except Leslie, but that’s another story).
See these and more camp photos at Flickr .
Related Posts
What Constitutes Clean Data?
Clean data is one of those terms everyone uses and few define precisely. Row counts match? No nulls in key columns? Values within expected ranges? All useful checks — and all insufficient once you move from a table view to a visualization view.
Read more
Curated MySQL Data Sets for Realistic Testing
Synthetic benchmarks have their place, but I have always preferred working with real data. Not client production data — that stays private — but publicly available datasets that reflect the messy shapes, skewed distributions, and indexing challenges you encounter in the wild.
Read more
COSCUP 2026: Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7
I recently had the pleasure of presenting Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7 at COSCUP 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan. COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) is one of the largest open source conferences in Asia, and the community there is always engaged and technically sharp.
Read more