Past Tuesday we had our 5th Belgian MySQL meetup with around 12 attendees, and it was great! I hoped for a large audience, but the spirits were good and we had some fun and good chats. I started out giving a brief history of MySQL and ending with Sun buying us. Important was to get the message out which Kaj explained us last week in Munich (Germany). The main topic was Performance Tuning best practices, but I didn’t go intensively deep on it.

.. I hope you bump into a wall and break your nose!!

It took a while, but I finally found time to upgrade my MySQL certifications from 4.1 to 5.0 and also the Cluster 5.1 one. Good feeling I passed them all on the first try! But, it ain’t easy! Even me having worked on some questions, and reviewing the Cluster ones more than a year ago, I made mistakes. Not easy!

I came home very tired yesterday, just walking around as a big MySQL billboard and I left with mixed feelings really. First feelings were Happiness + Anger (=Love??). I had a nice dinner with Bruce and Magnus (PostgreSQL) on Thursday, met others at their booth and attended a few talks both Saturday and Sunday. I’m interested in their stuff, I do like PostgreSQL, just like probably everyone else in MySQL. But, I got very angry about 2 remarks made in the DevRoom: “MySQL loses data” and the infamous and idiotic “MySQL has no transactions”.

A perfect dinner is more about the company, but a good restaurant helps too! If you’re in Antwerpen (Belgium) you’ll have to reserve a place at ’t Hofke (website in Dutch, but there are pictures and coordinates). The street to get to the restaurant is already worth going through.