I’ve been a bit slack about writing my MySQL thoughts of late. This would be caused by the fact that, as I write this, I’m now one week into a 12 month leave of absence from MySQL.

Having given it much careful consideration, I’ve decided that the wisest way to survive the current economic problems is by blowing my savings on a year long holiday in Italy. Wait, did I say holiday? Not really. I’m still a Sun employee, and I’m still going to be active in the MySQL community. My dear support customers just won’t be seeing me around for a while.

I’m looking forward to having time to write more extensively about some of the cool things we’re doing, and what’s going on in the community at large. If there’s anything you’d like to hear about (either expanding on my previous posts, or a completely new topic), please let me know.

Another thing …

Just a short announcement: I am going to join Ulf for his PHP Barbeque Tour across Germany, which will take place between June 15th until the 21st. We will start in the south of Germany and will work our way up north in one week, stopping by at various cities in Germany to enjoy a barbecue with local PHP User Groups and to talk about PHP (of course), MySQL, Open Source, The Web and anything else. We've set up a Wiki page that outlines the various stations of our journey. At the Moment, we will visit the following cities:

• Monday, 15th: Munich
• Tuesday, 16th: Frankfurt
• Wednesday, 17th: Karlsruhe
• Thursday, 18th: Berlin
• Friday, 19th: …

I just realized that I haven't blogged for more than a month! Shame on me. But I will blame it on being away on conferences and vacation for quite some time And if you are following me on twitter, you may have noticed what I was going on in my life and that I did't get hit by a bus...

So what was going on since I returned back home from the MySQL Conference? First off, I uploaded und sorted my pictures from the conference and the Drizzle developer day on Flickr. I also uploaded the slides (PDF) from Colin and myself speaking about "MySQL Server Backup, …

Travelling to Hongkong and Taipei has made such an impression on me, that I couldn’t help but add two new blogs to my homepage kaj.arno.fi:

• http://blogs.arno.fi/guanxi/ is (or pretends to be) in Simplified Chinese, written on the Chinese mainland
• http://blogs.arno.fi/yilingyi/ is (or pretends to be) in Traditional Chinese, written here in Taiwan

Guanxi means “relations”, as in “Community Relations”. It’s also a very common word describing how to get things done in China. It even has its own English language Wikipedia entry.

Yi-ling-yi means one-oh-one, as in Taipei 101. …

I’m writing this entry on my way back to Tokyo from Narita. So, I was in the US all week for MySQL UC, Percona Performance Conference and the Drizzle Developer Day. It was great to meet new people and also catch up with developer friends from all over the world. These events are great excuse to bring together folks that work together online and receive the free beers that were promised on IRC. Looking back, the week just flew! I can’t believe I’m back in Japan already.

What wasn’t pleasant however was Drizzle being introduced as “MySQL Drizzle” and described as MySQL’s technology incubator at the opening keynote. The truth is, Drizzle is a community driven project that is not affiliated with any commercial organization. The project is …

Hyatt Regency, Santa Clara
Originally uploaded by Lenz Grimmer

After a long and uneventful flight from HAM to SFO via FRA, I arrived safely in Santa Clara yesterday. Today we spent the day in San Francisco, for some sightseeing (Downtown, Chinatown, Pier 39 and Fishermen's Wharf) and a bit of shopping. It was a very nice and sunny day, the sunlight helped a lot with getting over the jetlag for a while.

But now I'm pretty tired - I look forward to meeting friends, colleagues and members of our community at the …

Coming to the Hyatt Santa Clara, for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009? Beware, that this year, the in-room Internet just isn’t so peachy.

When you check in, there’s this option of a “Business Plan” that Hyatt sells you - USD$30, for free wired in-room Internet (a $12.95/day value), free breakfast (this includes 15% gratuity, so a $20+ value), a free bottle of water (yes, otherwise its $3.95), and all the local and long distance calls in the US that you’ll need (depending on what you do, YMMV). It seemed like a good deal.

Now, for the benefit of others, which has taken about four days for me to fix. When you’re on this plan, the Hyatt rebates your Internet within an hour or so of you signing up for the deal. This tells their ISP that you’re now not able to get access to anything else, but Port 80 and Port 443 access — yes, SMTP, IMAP, SSH, IRC and all …

On early Tuesday morning, I made a quick trip to Paris, France, to attend and speak at the Solutions Linux / Open Source 2009 Conference. I've never been to this conference before and was quite surprised about its size - it's actually the largest Open Source event in France and it reminded me a lot of LinuxTag in Germany. Many well-known vendors (e.g. Sun, Novell, Canonical, Bull, etc.) were exhibiting. The also was a large "DotOrg" section for various Open Source projects and I was very happy to see that LeMUG.fr, the official MySQL User Group of France, had a table there, too! A big Thank You goes to Pascal Borghino, who manned that table on his own most of the time and answered questions about MySQL. I …

My travel schedule is getting quite crowded for the next months - I just received confirmation that I will be speaking at the phpDay in Verona, Italy on May 15-16th. I'll be talking about bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system as well as MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices in the developer track of the conference. I've never been to Verona, but it seems like it's a beautiful city. I look forward to being there!

Tomorrow, The Big Trek starts. Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana will spend the time from then on until the MySQL Conference and Expo starts travelling by rail and bus all the way from home in Montreal to California. Hence the name “Dups on Rails”. The purpose of the Big Trek is to talk about MySQL in Canadian and US universities. He’ll also arrange MySQL Meetups and go on customer visits, as people ping him.

Towards the end of the trip, as we get closer to the User Conference, Dups won’t be alone. His alter ego Colin Charles (yes, people do mix up Dups and Colin) will join him from 13 April onwards in Northern California. And at the same time, a parallel trek is started by Giuseppe Maxia an Sheeri K. Cabral, in Southern California.

The list of universities include Queens University, University of Western Ontario, Illinois Institute of Technology, Purdue University, University of …