As I mentioned some time ago, Software Freedom Day 08 will take place on Saturday, 20th of September 2008.
Coincidentally, the a large number of Sun/MySQL Engineers and other Sun folks will be in Riga, Latvia for an internal developer meeting around this day. To make use of this opportunity, we plan to give a number of sessions and presentations (in english) about various topics and to contribute to this global celebration of Open Source Software.
We've set up a Team Page on the Software Freedom Day web site for this event - the venue will be the Cafeteria Conference room in the basement of the University of Latvia, Riga, which can accomodate 60-80 people:
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I just got informed that two of my session proposals for DrupalCon 2008 got accepted - I will be speaking about the following topics there:
The second talk will be held in cooperation with Jakub Suchy, who will take over the practical demo. Sun Microsystems is a Gold Sponsor of the event and I am glad that we can show some support for this truly amazing and vibrant community CMS. DrupalCon 2008 will take place from August, 27th-30th in Szeged, Hungary. The list of proposed talks looks truly impressive! Among the key note speakers will be Dries Buytaert and Rasmus Lerdorf. I look very much forward to this conference. If you have a chance, make sure to attend it!
If you are new to MySQL and would like to get an overview about some best practices for securing a MySQL server and some commonly used backup techniques, consider attending this webinar (in german), held by yours truly. It will take place this Tuesday (2008-06-17) at 15:00 CEST - participation is free of charge! This is my first attempt to perform a webinar, I usually give talks in front of a live audience... Let's see how it goes.
I made it to the US safely, even though I almost missed my connecting flight in Heathrow (even my luggage made it, hooray!). I reached the Hotel just in time to directly head off to the traditional pre-conference party at Mårten's house. However, we just stayed there shortly (barely long enough to say hi to everybody) and then headed to the MySQL pre-conference dinner (organized by Arjen). It was nice meeting such a large number of the key MySQL community people in one place! I was especially surprised about the presence of Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green - this added a nice touch!
Today I am attending Stewart's tutorial session about MySQL Cluster. So far it has been quite entertaining and informative! We'll continue with hands-on excercises on setting up a cluster configuration on the attendees' laptops after the lunch break.
I have uploaded pictures from yesterday and this morning to my foto set on flickr (which I will also post to the MySQL Conference 08 Flickr group) and will try to continue doing so for the rest of the conference. Enjoy!
As Kaj already pointed out, the Sun/MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour will also make a stop in Munich, Germany this Friday. I will be there as well, we will meet at 14:00 at the Hilton Munich Park Hotel. Kaj and some other Sun people will join us a bit later. If you are in the area, make sure to stop by!
By the way, the Meetup Mashup Tour will make at least one more stop in Germany - I am organizing an event in Hamburg, Germany which will take place on Monday, April 7th (19:00). This was initially planned as another regular MySQL Meetup, but I offered to expand the scope a bit. We will now meet at the Sun offices, Sun will sponsor some food and drinks! In addition to the usual MySQL Meetup crowd, we expect participation from various Sun communities (e.g. OpenOffice/StarOffice, Java or OpenSolaris). As usual, there will be a MySQL tech talk (this time held by Giuseppe).
I look forward to this event - it will be exciting to mingle with the people from these other communities and to exchange experiences and make new contacts. If you live somewhere around the Hambur area and would like to participate, please RSVP via Meetup.com or Xing.com soon!
Since almost a year now, we host a weekly training session for our engineers on Thursday (14:00 UTC winter time), coined the "MySQL University". While it's primary purpose is to share and distribute knowledge about a wide variety of topics relevant to our own developers, many of the sessions are of general interest for developers on other projects as well.
Therefore we hold this sessions in the public and everybody is welcome to attend! You can listen to the presentation via an OGG Audio stream, questions can be posted via IRC on the #mysql-university channel on freenode.net. The audio file and IRC log will be saved, so you can also listen to past university sessions at a later point in time again.
Tomorrow's session will be about using the Valgrind memory checker, held by Stewart Smith, a colleague from Australia who is a member of the MySQL Cluster development team.
The next upcoming sessions include topics more closely related to MySQL Server development:
See the MySQL University page on the MySQL Forge Wiki for more details and follow the instructions for attendees to get connected.
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Hmm, long time no post! But I have the perfect excuse: I've actually been on vacation the past two weeks... Now I am back at work and busy trying to make a dent in the mail pile that has accumulated while I was gone. In addition to that, I am assisting with the organization of our MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg, which will take place in September. See Kaj's blog post for more details about it. I am in charge of our community guests and really look forward to meeting most of our internal developers as well as community guests there! This is going to be a fun event.
In addition to that, I am applying the final touches to my upcoming presentation about our ongoing community activities: "Opening the doors (and windows) of the Cathedral", which will be held at the FrOSCon in St. Augustin, Germany this weekend. My colleague Giuseppe will also give a talk about "Logging and monitoring a database server" and last but not least Susanne will give her famous "PostgreSQL versus MySQL - Venus versus Mars" talk. I really enjoyed last year's FrOSCon, it was a very relaxed and well organized event, with many great sessions. This years program looks promising, too - so if you happen to be in the area, make sure to stop by!
Oh, and if you happen to be around the New York City area today and tomorrow, consider checking by the MySQL Camp II, which will start today! There may still be some free seats available, make sure to check the site for registration instructions.

OSCON, the Open Source Convention organized by O'Reilly is coming up next week (July 23rd-27th, Portland, OR).
MySQL AB will be present in the exhibition area and we will also be giving some talks:
There are some other talks related to MySQL, that might be of interest for you:
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