FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source Conference, will take place on August 22nd and 23rd in Sankt Augustin, Germany. Sun Microsystems is a Gold Sponsor of the conference which takes place for the fourth time now. As for the previous years, the organizers have managed to arrange a great lineup of speakers and content. Presentations are held in both English and German — a first draft of the schedule is now available. However, it is still subject to change in some details, based on the feedback by the invited speakers.

I am looking forward to this event, especially since we're helping to organize the OpenSQL Camp subconference there, which will take place in parallel (there also is a subconference about Java this time). By the way: if you've missed the deadline for submitting your database-related talk to FrOSCon, you can still submit your talk for OpenSQL Camp until July, 19th! We look forward to your submission.

On the FrOSCon main tracks, there will be a number of MySQL-related talks as well as presentations about other Open Source projects sponsored and supported by Sun. Here's an excerpt from the schedule:

• Sebastian Bergmann: The State of Quality Assurance Tools for PHP
• Lenz Grimmer: Working for a Virtual Company - How do we do it at MySQL?
  
• Sonali Minocha: Best MySQL Performance Tuning Practices
• Walter Heck: MySQL Multi-Master Replication Failover - A step-by-step explanation
• Giuseppe Maxia: MySQL Sandbox 3
• Ulrich Graef: ZFS - Neue Funktionen und Technologien
• Sonali Minocha: MySQL Cluster Tutorial
• Johannes Schlüter: Better Know A Version: PHP 5.3
• Thorsten Früauf: Hochverfügbarkeit mit minimalem Cluster - Open HA Cluster on OpenSolaris
• Jörg Möllenkamp: Insights to Opensolaris

In addition to that, there are numerous other very interesting talks related to Linux, Open Source, Cloud Computing and other topics. There usually is a nice social event (BBQ) and BOFs on Saturday evening and the overall atmosphere at FrOSCon is very relaxed and friendly. So don't miss this opportunity!