The acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems has caused a certain amount of news in 2008 from the Initial announcement at the MySQL ACM, to the completion in just 6 weeks. It has been a very quick transition and while there is the potential for further opportunities with Sun as an employee within the MySQL product line and possibly other areas, I have elected to pursue my professional goals elsewhere.

My leaving MySQL Inc has been met with comments from “Woot!”, “Congratulations”, “Good Luck”, ‘That’s terrible”, “Are you sure”, “I’m shocked, but I don’t blame you” and attempts from multiple people to reconsider and reverse my decision. I was pleased …

Recently I got to spend a day with Jan Kneschke at his home in Kiel, Germany. This was an excellent opportunity to interact directly with a fellow MySQL employee and resident expert in several fields. Doing this on my own vacation time enabled me to control what I wanted to achieve.

Jan uses Linux, Windows and Mac OS/X all actively and with Synergy enables a single keyboard and mouse to work seamlessly across his three screens. I knew you could do this, just last year I tried to find out the software that could do it without obvious success.

Of interest was our discussion in English, while he was also communicating on IRC in German during the day. Being multi-lingual …

Today in Izhevsk, we had the best welcome a group of Sun-MySQL integration people could ever imagine. “As you’ve been flying a Corporate Jet, you now need a corporate car”, our reception committee said.

And, we travelled in style. After some shampanskoye, we were shuttled into the white limo (somehow exported from the US into Izhevsk) fixed by the local MySQLers.

Today’s Tip #1: If you look for meaty MySQL stuff, look elsewhere. If you look for travel tips for Russia, read this report of one of the most exciting day trips I’ve had in my life.

The Royal Welcome in Izhevsk

Today’s Tip #2: If you want to go to Izhevsk, then start in Moscow, fly due east towards the Ural mountains, and land after two thirds of the distance. Be sure to bring a Russian speaking co-co-pilot.

The first red carpet that has literally been rolled out for the MySQL Ambassador to Sun …

And not just a data charmer:

"Old school technologists don't think kindly of PHP. Its adepts are believed to be sloppy programmers that create brittle applications. It takes programmers like Sebastian Bergmann to level the score and to show that a good programmer is shown by best practices, not by the choice of language.
The best thing a good programmer can do while developing an application is testing. Sebastian shows why you should do it, and how. Not only that, it will show you how easy it is. At the end of this session you will wonder how could you have survived for years without unit testing.
PHP programmers, mark your calendars!"

My presentation on PHPUnit is his …

As Kaj already pointed out, the Sun/MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour will also make a stop in Munich, Germany this Friday. I will be there as well, we will meet at 14:00 at the Hilton Munich Park Hotel. Kaj and some other Sun people will join us a bit later. If you are in the area, make sure to stop by!

By the way, the Meetup Mashup Tour will make at least one more stop in Germany - I am organizing an event in Hamburg, Germany which will take place on Monday, April 7th (19:00). This was initially planned as another regular MySQL Meetup, but I offered to expand the scope a bit. We will now meet at the Sun offices, Sun will sponsor some food and drinks! In addition to …

Petabytes! Have you heard that before? Perhaps you have, during some theoretical IT class. But have you used anything that could be remotely close to petabytes?
A petabyte is one thousand Terabyte, or one million Gigabyte.
If you struggle with databases with a few dozen Gigabytes, and you have headaches when you think that you have to deal with Terabytes of data, you can't possibly imagine how to store petabytes of data, …

Let's see if you can solve this little puzzle...

Consider this stored procedure:

-- finds the first slash and exits
create procedure p_find_slash(p_text text)
begin
    declare v_index int default 1;
    declare v_length int default character_length(p_text);
    declare v_char char(1);
    
    _main_loop: while v_index <= v_length do                       -- loop over all characters
                
        set v_char := substring(p_text, v_index, 1);               -- grab the current character
        case v_char
            when v_char = '/' then                                 -- found a slash!                
                select concat('A slash at ', v_index) message;     -- report it
                leave _main_loop;                                  -- and then stop
            else …

Tuesday evening, Moscow was our next stop. Engineering, Support, Internal IT, Professional Services — as in Sweden, various MySQL departments were represented. Russia is a key personnel country for MySQL, and has been so for years. It’s my third time with MySQL in Moscow, and it feels good to start being able to find Count Dolgorukyi, Arbat, St. Basil’s Cathedral, Kremlin, the Red Square, and the Tverskaya Ulitsa.

So as not to bore you with repeating the MySQL on-boarding discussions we had, which were much the same as everywhere else, let me instead share our experience of how to login into Russia, and, more complicated, Marriott Grand Hotel on Tverskaya.

Scene 1: Yesterday, 15:00, Domodedovo airport, Rusaero Biznes Terminal.

• Immigration lady: Do you need an immigration card?
• We: Uhmm, if you say so
• No further action, we depart from Domodedovo, which …