The London MySQL Meetup Group hosted a new evening of MySQL related talks on December 11, this time in Canonical’s offices in the Blue Fin Building. Conveniently, it was timed so that it coincided with the Debian/Ubuntu packaging sprint, which I also attended.

We started with pizza, beer and small talk. Since this was my first meetup in London, there were lots of new and interesting people to meet and talk to.

The topic of the evening was “MySQL distributions: in the cloud and on bare metal”, but before we got that far, James Page and Robie Basak presented the results so far of our ongoing packaging sprint. I’ve covered that in another blog post, and Akhil discusses it here as well.

The first on-topic talk was Ivan Zoratti’s talk on databases in the cloud in general, and on Amazon Aurora in particular. We currently don’t know very much about the inner workings of Aurora, except that it must be running MySQL 5.6 with some modifications on the lower layers. So it’s mostly speculations, but it was fun to discuss and talk about what they might have done to achieve what they have. Let’s call it well educated guesses.

George Lorch from Percona presented on OpenStack and Trove. For us that are not involved with OpenStack in our daily work, it was a nice introduction to what Trove is and isn’t.

Finally, I was also asked to give a short talk on new features in the MySQL 5.7.5 DMR. It was just a quick review of some of the features, based on Geir’s blog post on the same topic. I noted that there was some interest in what we’ve done to make InnoDB temporary tables faster.

I usually attend MySQL meetups in Trondheim, Norway, so it was fun to see how they do things in London. I guess there aren’t that many ways to do it when the biggest difference I could find was that the pizza is served before the talks in London while we do it afterwards in Trondheim. I just wish we had a pub nearby in Trondheim so that we could copy the tradition of going for a pint afterwards.

A big thank you to everyone that came, and to the organizers for inviting me!