Japan is a wonderful place for someone like me.

Not only do I get to have sushi to my heart’s content. I am also exposed to the wonders of the Japanese culture, and — the topic of this blog posting — Japanese cultural imports from the West.

While preparing for the Sun-MySQL event last Wednesday, I was happy to see the back of Toru Takahashi-san’s laptop, featuring a big sticker with Snusmumriken and a small sticker with Duke.

• Toru-san is a Principal Solution Architect with the Software Practice in Sun Microsystems K.K. He was involved in the planning and execution of the Tokyo event in our Sun-MySQL World Tour. You can also meet him at the MySQL …

Last year open source analyst Michael Coté of Redmonk coined the term Little Four to describe four up-and-coming open source management vendors and as a foil to the Big Four of systems management.

In the open source space, the 4 names that come up each time ? usually from people I?m talking with even before I say anything ? are: Zenoss, Hyperic, GroundWorks, and openQRM.

…

I’m big in Japan.

I’m small in the US.

In Europe, I am size M.

Me trying out replacement clothes in Tokyo

On my trip to Japan, I thought I was smart by saving money through combining tickets in my fairly complicated trip Munich - Tokyo - Santa Clara - Beijing - Munich. So I booked MUC-PEK-MUC, PEK-NRT-PEK and NRT-SFO-NRT. That meant a stopover in Beijing on my way to Tokyo.

And that, in turn, meant lost luggage.

There was plenty of time to think about whether I would lose my newly-bought suit and my favourite lense (8mm Sigma fisheye) forever, but 59 hours later than myself, the bag finally turned up on the Stefonic residence doorstep in Minato-ku, Tokyo.

In the meantime, I had to buy some emergency clothes and time to make the above observation on clothing sizes: I’m usually M or L in Europe, I’m often S in …

This week’s Wednesday was a big thing for MySQL and Sun in Japan:

• Over 300 attendees to our World Tour event in Tokyo
• Over 30 press attendees to the press conference in the morning
• Availability of nine-to-five MySQL Technical Support in Japanese announced
• Availability of MySQL Enterprise Monitor in Japanese announced
• Availability of MySQL Knowledge Base articles in Japanese announced

I had the opportunity to keynote 60 minutes on the MySQL Architecture of Participation, with the first 5 minutes in Japanese.

Minasama, Konnichiwa.
Konotabi wa, Sun Microsystems toh MySQL AB no Tougou ni tsuite, *Kigaru* ni *Oiwai* shi, *Hanashiau* tameno, Launch Event he, Youkoso Okoshi Kudasaimashita.

[the following four minutes deleted]

Against all …

Right after Paris, Giuseppe and I turned our attention to Milan, Italy. The flight from Paris Roissy to Milan Malpensa (EasyJet, 57 euros/PAX) turned out to be clearly cheaper than the taxi ride from Malpensa to Sun’s Milan office, where we had the meetup.

In time before the meeting, we had some HR, integration and general planning discussions with Sun. One of the most difficult aspects turned out to be to pick the right form of coffee, as the number of alternatives in the coffee machine exceeded anything observed before.

Luckily, I’m a tea drinker, where the challenge limited itself to finding out how to change the default of adding sugar to drinking the tea straight.

The event saw over 100 participants. It was very competently arranged by Emanuela Giannetta, hosted and supported by Franco Roman and many other Italian Sun people — including Stefano De …

Last week’s Wednesday (seems like ages ago, and I haven’t got any blogging time since), the Sun MySQL Meetup-Mashup World Tour got to Paris.

The Meetup-Mashup gets a local flavour wherever we are. And the local flavour in Paris was an Irish Pub, where we had an intimate meeting with a good 160 of the closest friends of MySQL.

We had some bière gratuite (free beer) to celebrate the logiciels libres (free software), as well as a presentation by Giuseppe, after a brief introduction by myself and followed by an overview by Sun.

I had good encounters with old friends and made some new ones. Damien Seguy from Nexen.net belong to the oldest, and our discussions ranged …

Today I just happen to read May 2008 edition of Dr.Dobb’s Journal printed edition and the article “Kernel-mode Databases” written by Andrel and Alexander from McObject really excited me.

The basic principle of any database engine is its performance and scalability and success of any database in most part relays on these two concepts. To achieve this, operating system kernel plays a major role in the form of …

• resource allocation
• thread scheduling
• low-level hardware access
• network
• security

So, looks like eXtremeDB try to overcome from this by releasing kernel-mode database. The kernel mode package actually overrides most of the kernel access calls that database engine expects by replacing with optimized …

The MySQL Users Conference is just about to start. With MySQL now part of Sun, it is infusing a lot of energy and enthusiasm into MySQL and the conference. This is shaping up to be the best MySQL conference ever. If this is your first conference, here are my top 10 things I recommend you do to get ready for the conference: 1) Solidify your personal schedule and set backups in case a room is

Well, I'm pretty much packed, catching flights tomorrow. VirginBlue/United via Sydney. And in good tradition, I will arrive in San Francisco about 3 hours before I depart ;-) the joys of the dateline!
See you all there!

(Wow, the Sunday night dinner RSVP list is at 47 people now! No worries, the restaurant has enough space, do sign up and join us!)

After Microsoft released its beta version of “SQL Server Data Services“; I was more interested to know what kind of considerations were taken care in the design and architecture of SSDS in order to get performance, distribution of data and scalability as it is developed on top of SQL Server.

To my surprise, I noticed Microsoft is conducting the live event to answer some of these questions by following up Ryan Dunn blog; Today I also got the confirmation to attend the event and I look forward to get some of my general questions answered.

It will be interesting to see the pricing model of SSDS in the coming days, and might even attract if they make it FREE for initial customers and/or by setting the limit on the data usage by …