For this year’s MySQL Conference (and by “this year”, I do mean 2009), I wrote the blog entry about opening the Call for Papers over three months earlier. The blog entry was in early September 2008, and the deadline was in late October 2008.

Next year, the MySQL Conference 12-15 April 2010 in Santa Clara has a tighter Call for Papers. It’s now open, and it closes 27 January 2010.

This has its drawbacks (a short time for you to propose, a short time for the program committee to review), but it also has a …

The names next to the above topics are all well known: Sheeri K. …

FOSDEM 2010, the annual Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting will take place again on February 6th and 7th in Brussels, Belgium. Next year they will celebrate their 10th anniversary (congratulations!) and we feel very honored and happy to announce that the organizers accepted our request for a developer room! They had to reject many proposals due to the great demand (there were 39 applications, but there are only 12 rooms available per day). Therefore we are glad to be among the excellent projects that will be present there.

Our devroom is titled "MySQL and Friends" and will be available for sessions on Sunday, 7th from 09:00 - 17:00. It will be located in room AW1.121 and provides 81 seats, a video projector with VGA cable, and wireless Internet. As for …

Last week, my colleagues Giuseppe, Kai and myself attended the SAPO Codebits event in Lisbon, Portugal. Codebits is an annual, invite-only hacking event, which went on for three days. The venue they chose this year was the "Cordoaria", a former rope factory located in the Belém district, close to the 25 de Abril Bridge (which is an impressive sight!). I have been told that the Cordoaria is the longest building in Portugal and I have no doubts about that! The building is so long that the crew used bicycles to get from one end to the other. I've taken a number of …

…

This time of the year is usually a very busy one, as there are plenty of events and conferences to attend. Just take a look at our calendar of OSS events on the MySQL Forge to see what I mean! Here's a quick summary of the ones that I will attend and speak at until the end of this year:

On November 14-15, I'll attend the openSQL Camp in Portland (OR), USA. I missed the first one that took place in Charlottesville (VA) in 2008, but had a lot of fun organizing the European Edition earlier this year. The upcoming one will be more like an unconference again - the list of …

I have been very busy here in Malaysia this week. On thursday, I was asked to do a MySQL University session on MMM. The preparation was very stressful. There was no good wifi to be found until literally a few hours before the session (Big thank you to Gurdip at APIIT for providing a space and exceptional help!). On top of that, dimdim, the software used by MySQL for their sessions doesn’t seem to want to work on Linux (particularly the speaker part). I ended up using a laptop borrowed from APIIT with Vista and IE. Feels kind of counter-intuitive for a company in the FOSS business.

The session went very well and here is the resulting recording of the MMM talk on the mysqlforge page.

But that wasn’t the end of the MMM-promotion week: I happened to be allowed to present at the foss.my …

FOSDEM, the Free and Opensource Conference, will again take place in Brussels, Belgium on Saturday and Sunday (6th and 7th February, 2010). Now happening for the 10th time (congratulations!), it is one of the largest Open Source conferences in Europe, with a strong focus on developers. Sun/MySQL have been regular sponsors of and contributors to the event in the past and it is alway a great experience to be there. It's very rare to meet so many well-known and bright people from such a wide range of OSS projects.

They have now opened their Call for Participation - the organizers are seeking input on talks for the main conference tracks (deadline: 2009-11-22) , …