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I will be attending Community One tomorrow and on Thursday at Marriott Marquis Hotel, New York, NY. I am especially looking forward to the announcements tomorrow which sound very interesting :)

The first day is a free event featuring:

* Cloud Platforms – Development and deployment in the cloud.
* Social and Collaborative Platforms – Social networks and Web 2.0 trends.
* RIAs and Scripting – Rich Internet Applications, scripting and tools.
* Web Platforms – Dynamic languages, databases, and Web servers.
* Server-side Platforms – SOA, tools, application servers, and databases.
* Mobile Development – Mobile platforms, devices, tools and application development.
* Operating Systems and Infrastructure – Operating systems and virtualization.
* Free and Open – Open-source projects, business models, and trends.

The second day of the event is focused on Deep Dives with two half-day sessions on MySQL and two full-day sessions on Java and Web development. I will be attending the session, "Using Java EE and SOA to Architect and Design Robust Enterprise Applications."

Following the conference, I will be a panelist at a Cloud Computing Seminar at Microsoft office in NY. It's going to be a long but exciting day!

It will be great to catch up with old and new friends at the event.

Came across an interesting post by Bret (co-founder of FriendFeed) about how FriendFeed uses MySQL to store "schema-less" data. According to the post, they weren't having issues with scaling existing features but rather they were experiencing pain when trying to add features.

Now the way they are using MySQL is interesting and bizarre at the same time. At a very high level, it seems their approach is to use a RDBMS as if it is a column-oriented database. Of course, it makes me wonder why not just use a column-oriented database? I need to read the post again in the morning (too tired right now so just gave it a quick glance).

I am very interested in hearing thoughts from my peers at Planet MySQL regarding this approach. They seem to have gone great lengths to go this route. What issues and benefits you see of this approach and whether you ever see yourself taking this route? I, for one, am not entirely convinced of this approach and whether it can really scale down the road. Also, if it was someone other than Friend feed going down that route, I might have actually lost my tempered and yelled :)

Side note: Friendfeed is growing fast, and it would have been cool if Bret was speaking at one of the three upcoming MySQL events in April.

Today I discovered Stack Overflow, a collaborative site that focuses on technical Questions. You can ask questions related to any language, apparently without having to register. The site is currently in beta. There are also a few MySQL questions that are currently unanswered.

Sorry for not updating this blog regularly. My wife's due date is soon so I've busy.

Anyway, I wanted to share this very funny interview with Jonathan Schwartz (puppet):