My Japan trip was full of meetings, as trips to Japan usually are. One of the most interesting ones was at Sun Microsystems K.K.’s site, with a number of people engaged in building Japanese communities for Sun.

Takashi Shitamichi, Yoko Suga, Natsuki Wakabayashi, Jim Grisanzio,
Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Satoshi Kawai, myself, Toshiro Umetsu, Takanobu Masuzuki

From Jim Grisanzio and others, I learned that Japan is Sun’s most active blogging country outside the US, on blogs.sun.com. And I got reminded of the messages heard many times at numerous Sun meetings: That Sun has Community experts both in Marketing and Engineering. On the contrary, MySQL’s Community Team is a separate entity, outside of both Marketing and …

Twice a year, Sun invites their Sun Fellows, Sun Distinguished Engineers and many Principal Engineers, Sales Engineers and Consultants to an offsite meeting, usually in California and this time in the Chaminade in Santa Cruz. For the first time, we now had MySQLers present — and over 20 of us.

The purpose of the meeting is to share new trends, new technologies, and new ideas across Sun’s wide spectrum spanning everything from the bare metal of the Niagara system through other aspects of system all the way to software.

I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to describe MySQL the Product, MySQL the Business and MySQL the Culture, in a long 90 minute day session in front of all the audience. Our Product, Business and Culture were described by a six-headed panel, with Jim Starkey, Jan Kneschke, Michael “Monty” Widenius, Mikael Ronström, Igor Babaev and Serg …

Yesterday, we concluded the Sakila Express World Tour, more aptly named “Sakila Tour of Seven Top European MySQL AB Sites Using Decadence Airlines“. The last two were in Germany: Hamburg in the north, in Sun’s offices, and Munich in the south, in Hilton am Tucherpark.

In Hamburg, we went directly into the meat with three hardcore developers. Onboarding, intellectual property, and contractors were the hardcore topics.

Ulf, Jan and Kay experienced Izhevsk and Kiev vicariously through the blog

The discussions added plenty of colour to the picture for Julie and Dave. Julie has a great metaphor for explaining the purpose of Sakila Express: To understand how the integration message comes out in the other end, in the Telephone game (also known as Chinese whispers, in German as Stille Post, in Swedish as Ryska …

Today in Kiev, we had a great time with MySQLers in Engineering and Support. And I got competition in the area of photography from Oleksandr “Sanja” Belkin. Other than that, this blog entry is again of the sit-back-and-relax type, not going into lots of MySQL detail. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t have gone into detail, though, although we saw more churches under the leadership of our Kiev team than we had seen in a long time.

This is how much I like my Sigma 8mm lens

We started the day by looking at Sun’s on-boarding procedures for MySQLers in the Ukraine, sipping tea and coffee at the Hotel President. And we went through Sun’s business model, through the importance of retaining the Eventum systems for Support, about how MySQL-time contractors are managed as part of Sun, as well as other topics familiar from other MySQL locations. Our Sun colleagues noted that our values, topics and concerns seem to …

Today in Izhevsk, we had the best welcome a group of Sun-MySQL integration people could ever imagine. “As you’ve been flying a Corporate Jet, you now need a corporate car”, our reception committee said.

And, we travelled in style. After some shampanskoye, we were shuttled into the white limo (somehow exported from the US into Izhevsk) fixed by the local MySQLers.

Today’s Tip #1: If you look for meaty MySQL stuff, look elsewhere. If you look for travel tips for Russia, read this report of one of the most exciting day trips I’ve had in my life.

The Royal Welcome in Izhevsk

Today’s Tip #2: If you want to go to Izhevsk, then start in Moscow, fly due east towards the Ural mountains, and land after two thirds of the distance. Be sure to bring a Russian speaking co-co-pilot.

The first red carpet that has literally been rolled out for the MySQL Ambassador to Sun …

After Dublin, our next stop on the World Tour was Sweden. While several MySQLers were out on travel (in Dublin, amongst other places!) related to the Sun-MySQL integration, we had the opportunity to meet with Swedish MySQL employees from various parts of the organisation, including Sales, Engineering, Support, and Internal IT.

Yesterday’s dinner at Domtrappkällaren was a memorable one, with an opportunity to share war stories and anecdotes with our Sun colleagues Dave Douglas and Julie Ross. They got their fair share of tales from past MySQL Developer Meetings (ah, Prague! ohh, Sorrento!) and Staff Meetings (you wouldn’t believe what happened to this new guy in Sales on his first day, when arriving at his hotel room in Cancùn).

Equally important, we took time to look at what will happen next. Swedes will in short order be on-boarded, which involves everything form signing papers to getting their first salary from Sun, as …

“If you’d like to get out of the aircraft quickly, and we’re not around to help you, grab this red handle on the door and pull it up.” Our friendly pilot just gave us his friendly security instructions at take-off from Dublin airport, on the way to Bromma in Stockholm. Dave Douglas, Julie Ross and myself are heading on the first leg of our trip to meet MySQL personnel across Europe.

I’ve been frequently teased about using “Sun’s Corporate Jet”. Flying around on that one is certainly perceived as glamorous, and perhaps not compatible with the humble roots of MySQL. Well, glamorous or not, here we are, three people, three empty seats and two pilots up in the sky. However, it’s not exactly “Sun’s” jet. It’s Netjets, more like a taxi than a company car. We’re going to have a different pilot tomorrow, and a different plane. That said, I do enjoy it and I took my favourite gadget, my 8mm fisheye lens, …

Since well before I joined MySQL in 2001, I have had contact with now-members of the four-headed management team of Germany’s top-notch PHP experts and solution providers Mayflower GmbH.

Mayflowers and MySQLers frequently pop into each other at PHP conferences and other Open Source events, and meet informally under various circumstances ranging from Christmas parties to Biergarten discussions. It’s always interesting to exchange thoughts on virtual companies, Open Source, business models, IRC, scrum, and finding developers (some of which have worked for both MySQL and Mayflower, incidentally). And by sheer coincidence, Mayflower’s Munich headquarters is now about 150 metres from where I live, in the same street that I look out at from my home office (Mannhardtstr.). This time, they copied us, though — I …

Now we have The Real Thing: MySQL joins Sun Microsystems!

On 16 January 2008, less than six weeks ago, Sun announced their definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB. That “definite agreement” was still subject to government approval in the US, Germany and Austria, and to the signing of the legal transfer documents by MySQL AB’s current owners.

Those hurdles have now been passed, and the acquisition is thus official. MySQL is part of Sun!

Many community members and customers have surely thought of Sun’s acquisition as a Done Deal already. Perhaps there never was any real uncertainty about it, but at least theoretically, there still was a risk of the deal not closing. That uncertainty is now removed.

This is very exciting for us at MySQL.

The last six weeks, we’ve been living under special circumstances: We’ve known that Sun is acquiring us. We’ve seen and experienced that …

As part of planning our integration into Sun, we surveyed all MySQLers on their opinions regarding Sun, their concerns and ideas. Amongst concerns, “retaining the MySQL Culture” ranked second.

MySQL Staff Meeting in Budapest 2003; time off in the Gellért Baths

But what exactly is “The MySQL Culture”? That’s never been written down, and defining culture is usually a matter for anthropologists, not Open Source companies.

So we decided to ask. Instead of engaging field anthropologists, we just added a question to the survey. And did we get answers! This is what the foremost experts, i.e. our employees, think constitutes MySQL Culture:

• A diversified and distributed workforce
• Lack of empire building
• A place for geeks
• Lack of …