Masood Mortazavi is an Engineering Manager at the Sun Database Group. After the acquisition of MySQL, and along with the rest of Sun's original database technology group, he joined the MySQL organization to form the larger Sun Database Group. In this interview, Masood talks with Lenz about the flexibility and diversity of Sun as a workplace, his life prior to joining Sun and his current assignment to improve the MySQL code contribution process.

Petr does a nice job of demonstrating this feature in action. The comments are pretty enthusiastic, which is quite encouraging (I like this one: "My god, this is genius, I would have never thought about something like this."). Cool.

http://blogs.sun.com/netbeansphp/entry/sql_code_completion_in_the

Here is my personal recipe for celebrating MySQL 5.1 GA (called “Five shot one“):

Ingredients:

• Kalashnikov vodka from Izhevsk, Udmurtia (

My tutorial proposal was accepted, so I'll be speaking April 20 at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 in Santa Clara.My tutorial is "SQL Antipatterns Strike Back." SQL Antipatterns are frequent blunders committed by software developers, both novice and expert.I gave a similar tutorial last year, and I think it was well-received. I'm keeping and improving the most interesting topics from last

One of the best ways to keep up with your field and network at the same time is to attend conferences. It’s one of the things I look forward to every year. After learning that O’Reilly has decided to commit blasphemy and *not* hold OSCON in Portland, Oregon the same week as the Oregon Brewers Festival, I was inspired to look around at what other conferences I might attend in 2009. Turns out, this is a huge pain in the ass, because I can’t find a single, central place that lists all of the conferences I’m likely to be interested in.

So… I created a public Google Calendar. It’s called “US Technical Conferences”. It needs more conferences, but I’ve listed the interesting ones I found. In order to keep the calendar from getting overwhelmingly crowded, I’ve decided that conferences on the list should:

• Deal with open source technology in some way. This is purposely broad.
• Be at least 3 days in …

Markus Rex returns to Novell’s Linux business unit. Red Hat’s second largest shareholder cuts its stake. The CEOs of Novell, Sonatype, Digium and Kaltura go on the record. Shaun Connolly joins SpringSource. And more.

Official announcements
Novell Announces Executive Appointments to Focus on Cross-Platform Solution Strategy and Growing Linux Business Novell

Palamida Finds Security Tops List of Concerns Inhibiting Broader Open Source Adoption Palamida

GigaSpaces Announces Extreme Scalability for MySQL Enterprise Customers GigaSpaces

…

OK, I cheated and read my 'work' email! Today my talk proposal got accepted and I'm off to the MySQL Conference & Expo, held in Santa Clara (CA, USA), end April 2009. My talk will be about the MySQL Support Team: how it started, the transformation it went through and how it scales today (and much more!).

This is my first talk overseas! I'm quite excited!

The European search technology company has picked up a series A round of funding. Its consumer product is European events search tool Happenr.

I had to disable write access for anonymous mantis account because of the spam in comments. Will enable it one I add some kind of protection. For now - please register to report a bug. Thanks.

I have, in the past, worked for startups of varying forms. I worked for a spinoff that ultimately failed but had the most awesome product I’ve ever seen (neural networks were involved, need I say more?), I helped a buddy very early on with his startup, which did great until angel investors crept in, destroyed his vision, and failed completely to understand the Long Tail vision my buddy was trying to achieve, and I worked for a web 2.0 startup which was pretty successful, and was subsequently purchased… by another startup!

Working in academia for 6 years also exposed me to people who are firing up businesses, or projects that accidentally become businesses, and some of those go nowhere, while others seem to be on the verge of NYSE listing now, while a year ago they were housed in the smallest office I’ve ever seen, using lawn furniture for their workstations.

Of course, I’ve also consulted for, and been interviewed by, a …