Hi - by now you might have read there's 17,000 of us attending VMworld in San Francisco. Huge crowds, just as Rick Vanover predicted. Lots of energy and excitement as you can imagine. This post is designed to bring some of the show to you, assuming you're not attending and queuing up to a session 45 mins before the start.

OK, I admit it: I’m looking forward to VMworld like a kid looks forward to camp. But for exactly the opposite reason: VMworld marks the end of summer and the beginning of the fall tradeshow season. Summer, despite its all-American goodness, is an odd time for our industry—no less busy due to fall preparations, but devoid of the big moves, vision and ideas that make it exciting. That’s saved for the fall, when everyone is back from the beach and ready to listen.

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After you make a low, one-time payment, you can use a DB Instance at an hourly rate that is significantly lower than the On-Demand pricing for the same instance class. This will result in a decrease in AWS charges for any application that requires full-time access to a relational database.