If you wonder why there hasn't been an update from me for quite a while — I just returned from two months of paternal leave, in which I actually managed to stay away from the PC most of the time. In the meanwhile, I've officially become an Oracle employee and there is a lot of administrative things to take care of... But it feels good to be back!

During my absence, Giuseppe and Felix kicked off the Call for Papers for this year's European OpenSQL Camp, which will again take place in parallel to FrOSCon in St. Augustin (Germany) on August 21st/22nd. We've received a number of …

As I already wrote, I will be speaking at the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara in two weeks and I am excited to be there again. This year's conference is going to be interesting for a number of reasons, but most importantly I think that the schedule looks great! This is going to be a "drinking from the firehose of MySQL knowledge" event. Afterwards, I'll be on parental leave in May and June, so I likely will miss a lot of great conferences – these months are usually quite packed, as our Open Source Events Calendar can confirm. I just received a notice that my talk …

GNUnify is one of the major annual FOSS events here in India. Organised by the students of Symbiosis Institute for Computer Science & Research and the Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG), GNUnify is an event of consequence in the Indian FOSS ecosystem. This year, the conefrence took place on Feb 19th and 20th in the wonderful city of Pune.

I submitted two papers on MySQL and fortunately both of them were selected. Thanks to the organising team, who were helpful enough to schedule both …

I'm happy to announce that my talk "Making MySQL administration a breeze - a look into a MySQL DBA's toolchest" has been accepted for this year's edition of the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, which will take place on April 12-15, 2010. The session is currently scheduled for Wednesday 14th, 10:50 in Ballroom E.

My plan is to provide an overview over the most popular utilities and applications that a MySQL DBA should be aware of to make his life easier. The focus will be on Linux/Unix applications available under opensource licenses that ease tasks related to user administration, setting up and administering replication setups, performing backups and security audits.

Of course I will cover the usual …

I’m a little behind in announcing this but I’m going to be speaking at O’Reilly’s MySQL Conference this year. My presentation is a three hour tutorial titled, Drizzle Storage Engine Development. Practical Example with BlitzDB. Three hours is a long time but I assure you that there will be a break.

This session isn’t solely about going through Drizzle’s Storage Engine API. Various performance topics like B+Tree structure, memory handling and concurrency control will be covered. I will also go through BlitzDB’s design concept and it’s internal stuff. So, needless to say I’ll talk a lot about Tokyo Cabinet and it’s internals as well.

Hopefully those that come along will walk out of the tutorial standing far ahead of the start line. It will help you get started on reading the implementation of other storage engines in the …

The tracks of this year's "MySQL & Friends" Developer Room at FOSDEM 2010 have now been scheduled - please check the Wiki page for details on the talks as well as some background information about the speakers. This info should soon be available via the FOSDEM conference system as well. We had some last-minute changes and we actually managed to schedule two more talks due to a small glitch in the initial calculation. The topics look very interesting, we hope that we can provide some valuable information for developers, users as well as MySQL DBAs!

One of our speakers (Kris Buytaert) suggested to arrange a joint dinner for Saturday evening, which is indeed a good idea! Thankfully he also volunteered for coordinating it - thanks in advance! …

We are happy to announce the selected sessions for our "MySQL and Friends" developer room at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. It will take place on Sunday, 7th of February from 9:00-17:00 in Room AW1.121.

In total, we received 20 submissions from 15 speakers. We'd like to thank them very much for their great proposals!

As we only have 12 speaking slots (20 mins each) available that day, we first needed to perform a selection process. Unfortunately there wasn't enough time to perform a full-blown voting process that involved the community at large. Since we didn't want to do this in a completely closed committee, we decided to involve all speakers that submitted a talk in this.

After this voting process, the final candidates are (ordered by last name).

Update: Mikael …

A Happy New Year to all of you! About a month ago we posted our initial Call for Papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. We already received several great submissions and we'd like to thank the speakers who contributed their suggestions so far. But we would like to get some more!

Therefore we decided to extend the deadline for a few more days: you can still submit your talk proposals until tomorrow (Wednesday, 6th)!

So if you think you have an interesting MySQL-related topic to talk about, we'd like to hear about it! Thanks.

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 …