November 12th, 2008

We're stuffing November with another great presentation. This time we're pleased to host Sun/MySQL with Duleepa Wijayawardhana and Giuseppe Maxia on two of the hottest topics - as in pumpkin pie - social applications and performance. Join this special event at the Suspenders Bar and Restaurant for a great talk from the technical leaders at Sun/MySQL.

Writing a Social Application with PHP/MySQL
And what happens when a million people show up on opening day
Imagine you've decided to create a social application for the web. Imagine that contrary to popular belief amongst all your peers, you've managed to find the secret missing ingredient to social networking and a million people show up, 990,000 more than you thought would actually bother. We'll discuss real life scenarios where that actually happened to me and all the lessons learned "on the job".

Some of what we will go into:

• Creating Social Applications with PHP/MySQL and how it's changed over the years.


• The difference between High Performance and High Availability in an application and database.


• Identifying the pain points in an application.


• Using MySQL features to scale an application.


• Building the ability into your application and database to scale including the use of memcached.


• Some details and/or introduction to using XDebug, Explain and monitoring.

Consider this a fun interactive talk filled with many horror stories of the amazing things that go wrong in real life when you've thought you've planned well.

This talk can cover as much technical detail as needed!

Duleepa Wijayawardhana (Dups) is MySQL's newly minted North American Community Relations Manager and was plucked from the clutches of MySQL Web Team where he has worked for the last 1.5 years. The Web Team manages the external web sites of MySQL which draw a considerable amount of web traffic.

Before joining MySQL, Dups worked for game developer BioWare Corp. in Edmonton, Canada where he helped develop and run the extremely popular BioWare Community Site (Neverwinter Nights Community), BioWare Store, and various other web properties as well as Manager for BioWare's Application Support Team.

Dups has a personal site at http://www.dups.ca, a new Sun blog at
http://blogs.sun.com/dups, an open source app he should be promoting more at http://www.bigdaddymonitor.org and a penchant for getting himself in trouble.

NOTE: This meeting is NOT at IBM and on 11/12/08. RSVP is not required.