Tungsten University

We have started a new series of webinars at Continuent that we call Tungsten University.  They provide education on Tungsten clustering and replication in handy one-hour chunks.  These are not sales pitches.  Our goal is to provide accessible education about setting up and operating Tungsten without any marketing fluff.

The first Tungsten University webinar entitled "Configure & provision Tungsten clusters" will take place on Thursday January 17th at 10:00 PST.  It will show you how to set up a cluster in Amazon EC2.  There will be a repeat on January 22nd at 15:00 GMT.  We usually record webinars, so you can look at them later as well. 

You do not have to be a customer to attend these webinars, just interested in Tungsten.  I hope users of our open source Tungsten Replicator will attend, since we will have a number of presentations on replication.  Here are some of the future webinar topics we are considering: 

• Setting up, deploying, and upgrading Tungsten Replicator 
• Setting up multi-master and fan-in replication topologies
• Configuring Tungsten Connector for transparent SQL routing and load balancing
• Replication tips and tricks (such as how to improve performance and fix broken replicators)
• Implementing zero-downtime maintenance and schema upgrade
• Replicating between MySQL and Oracle
• Loading MySQL data into a Vertica data warehouse

There will be more titles out soon, so watch our webinar list and the announcements on the Continuent Tungsten blog.  If there are topics that you would like to hear about please suggest them as comments on this blog or the official Continuent blog.  

Meanwhile, I am looking forward to doing some of the replicator presentations and attending the talks on clustering.  I mostly write code for the replicator, so talks about other parts of Tungsten tend to be learning experiences.  The Tungsten Connector is particularly interesting because it makes off-the-shelf database replicas look like a single DBMS server and transparently switches connections between them.  It is our secret sauce for creating master/slave clusters.  If you have not seen Tungsten Connector  before, I recommend attending that talk when it comes up.  I'm still amazed how well it functions even after working with it for a number of years.