OK, so OSCON is one of, if not the, largest open source conference in the world. The complete list of sessions and tutorials is staggering. So, for those of you Sakila fans heading out to Portland for the "big gig" next week, I figured I would highlight the MySQL sessions and tutorials and also give my top 6 picks of the sessions you simply shouldn't miss.

MySQL Related

• Monday has both my own "Maximum Velocity MySQL" (on performance tuning and coding) and Brian's "MySQL 5.1 In-Depth" tutorials. Note that Brian is also giving …

At OSCON next week, I'm giving a presentation entitled Making Sales While Making Friends: Lessons Learned from Open Source Businesses. I'm in the middle of preparing it, and also reflecting on some conversations I had earlier this week with sales executives from MySQL, Red Hat, JasperSoft, and SugarCRM.

In the course of those conversations, I was surprised by how differently we supposedly similar open source companies run our operations. We're each an open source company, but with varying licensing, sales, and support models. That's a good thing.

But it's also a perplexing thing if you're trying to weave together a common theme between them.

After our meeting, I spent some time on Sourceforge, pulling download data and correlating it to company revenues for these and other open source companies. After awhile, similarities started to …

OK, so next week is OSCON, in case you hadn't heard... I will be presenting a tutorial entitled Maximum Velocity MySQL on Monday morning, from 8:30am until noon, in room Portland 255. The tutorial will cover advanced SQL, schema and index strategies, and performance tuning topics, with lots of code examples and demonstrations. It should be a great time, and there'll be lots of giveaways, so be sure to check it out.

Additionally, there is a MySQL BoF session scheduled for Thursday evening from 8pm to 9pm in room D135. We'll be providing pizza (and probably beer if we can get our hands on some). I will be there along with Arjen and likely Brian as well. We hope to have discussions with …

I spent a productive hour with Krugle yesterday, meeting with a few members of management: Steve Larsen (CEO), Laura Merling (VP, Business Development - yes, that Laura Merling), and Ken Krugler (CTO). I have to admit: I went into the meeting with low expectations. In Ken's words, I figured a vertical search engine focused on open source and development might be interesting, but not useful (with "use" translating into dollars).

I was wrong.

First off, Krugle is more than a vertical search engine. It does that, and it does it extremely well. Krugle aggregates the many and various open source software repositories (Sourceforge being just one of them), indexes them, and makes them easily, productively searchable. So, if I know I need a utility to convert documents …

Bet you didn't think "Unisys" when you read that subject line, but it's true, all the same. Unisys has done a great job reinventing itself and extending its brand and expertise into new territory, most recently open source software. The firm has strong and growing relationships with MySQL and JBoss, and will increasingly be seen as one of the primary go-to partners for open source.

Julie Giera of Forrester has an interesting report on Unisys' open source services. The report deals primarily with Unisys, but also has interesting things to say about the larger open source services market.

On Unisys she says:

Unisys has announced a set of service offerings, called OASIS, for companies with open source platforms. It is the first time that a major IT service provider has offered a fully integrated set of services - including …

One of the most important requirements for any startup is hiring exceptional people. Hire weak people, and the company rises to the level of their incompetence. Hire exceptional people, and the company is elevated to the level of their expertise.

So how do you hire well in open source, given that - outside the realm of developers - very few business people actually have open source experience?

This is a question that I've had to answer repeatedly of late, as I've been hiring Alfresco's North and South American sales and business development organization. I have been very fortunate thus far, hiring three of the best people I've ever worked with: Luis Sala (Solutions Engineering), Jason Hardin (Inside Sales), and Martin Musierowicz aka "Mark" (Alliances).

What do most of Alfresco's employees have in common? Not a minute of open source experience. (Martin (JBoss) and Jason (Novell) are exceptions to this rule, as both came …

I've been fortunate to be able to help Tim put together the Open Source Executive Briefing for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention this year. Fortunate because my views of open source tend not to stray far from "What will make my company more money today?" Tim, of course, tends to think in terms of years and decades, not days and weeks. So working with him has helped me see a bit farther out into the darkness to see where open source is going.

The picture is very, very bright.

However, most people will continue plodding along in their "open source is about commodification" mode, missing out on the bigger picture(s), unless they attend. There are very few events that I think can fundamentally change the way you look at, invest in, and monetize open source technology. This …

I got asked (being a Java developer) about what was involved in creating an Eclipse Plugin for Mercurial. Well in true Google style, why invent when somebody probably already has. A quick check finds Mercurial Eclipse by VecTrace.

Now until last week, I’d never heard of Mercurial, so this is really an introduction to somebody that has no idea.

What is Mercurial?

Mercurial is a fast, lightweight Source Control Management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects.

Ok, so big deal, I use CVS. I also use Subversion (SVN) for my Apache contributions, and also for MySQL GUI products. Why do we need another Version Control Product? Mercurial is a Distributed Software Configuration Management Tool. …

eWeek Labs ran an extensive "stack" test pitting various Windows and Linux stacks. The results show that the opportunity for open source apps is probably larger then most of have realized. The results also show that there are use cases to support both sides. Let the battle rage on.

eWEEK Labs Bakeoff: Linux Versus .Net Stacks
Based on our forays into user forums for many top open-source enterprise applications, there are many IT managers attempting to run open-source products on Windows servers-attracted, no doubt, to the benefits and efficiencies of using open source without having to become Linux administrators.

The results of our WAMP stack tests indicate that these folks might be on to something. Our WAMP stack setups included …

I'm not sure what it is, but Silicon Valley so desperately wants to be the center of everything, that sometimes it has to resort to myths to keep itself there. Where? Exactly. That's the question. It's a question I didn't think could be all that controversial when I said it at OSBC London, but now that it has been slashdotted, I guess it's officially a Big Deal. For 3.5 seconds.

Dana had a good response to my post about Europe remaining the center of open source. Now a few others have jumped on the bandwagon, and their critiques aren't quite as salient.

Matthew Aslett tries (and fails, though he never claimed his method was perfect) to illustrate on a map …