We had 20 people at this month's meeting, nearly an SRO crowd!

John won the PUG ticket to Bridge http://opensourcebridge.org/. As usual, Wheeler won the introductions.

Then we were on to our feature presentation: Chris May on the challenges he faced with a very large MySQL database which he interited. (Hint: This isn't something you want Aunt Mabel to leave you in her will.) This was probably the scariest presentation we've had to date. Granted, some of the issues were version-related, and there were some people-handling speedbumps (trust between sysadmins & DBAs, no F2F time, etc.), but overall this presentation just crushed me. For starters, Chris discovered that row-level locking on his version of MySQL was per-server-instance: users of the other database on the same server were locked out when he was working in his sandbox database. Then he had to wait 3 days for a rollback. It's enough to drive one to drink. In fact, I believe I'm going to go pour myself something & let Chris's slides handle the rest of this.