In addition to our main MySQL Users Conference that took place in April, there will also be two small MySQL Conferences in Europe later this year. There will be presentations about our products and roadmaps as well as sessions about best practices and first-hand customer experiences. You will also get a chance to meet and talk with many MySQLers and share your thoughts and experiences. The conferences will take place in London, UK (Tuesday, October 17th) and in Munich, Germany (Thursday, October 19th). The conference program looks very interesting and there is an early bird discount, if you register before August 31st. So don't hesitate to register soon!

While I was at the FOSDEM 2006 in Brussels, I got approached by the folks from Source21.nl about performing an interview about MySQL with them. But as David Axmark (who is one of the co-founders of MySQL) was around as well, I quickly directed them to talk with him instead. The vidcast (length is ~10 minutes, the WMV is ~30MB) is now available online in various formats (OGG, MP4 and WMV) from their web site. Have fun.

This Wednesday I participated on a panel discussion about "Open Source in the Enterprise - Chances and Risks" at the JAX 2006 conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. It was a lively discussion, with good comments and questions from the audience.

One thing I found noteworthy is that many people still seem to be worried about using OSS when it comes to licensing and legal questions. In fact, these concerns seem to be more dominant than preoccupations about the technical capabilities of OSS software itself. Some claimed that they find OSS licenses confusing and do not feel certain if their usage of OSS actually complied to the licenses. I was thankful that we had Till Kreutzer from the ifrOSS on the panel as well, who (in my opinion) did a good job in dispelling a few myths …

 On June 24th/25th, the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) will be held in Sankt Augustin, Germany. I have submitted two talks (in english), which both got accepted: "MySQL Administration: Backup and Security Strategies on Linux" and "The MySQL Business Model: Where and how we thrive". The sessions will take place on Saturday, but I will be around on Sunday, too. In addition to my sessions, there will be two more MySQL-related talks: "MySQL Cluster: an Introduction - A journey into High Availability" by Geert Vanderkelen (one of our MySQL Cluster Support experts) and "Pivot …

The JAX Innovation Award is intended to honour and recognise the most remarkable and outstanding European contributions in the world of Java and Eclipse. These contributions can include products, open source projects, ideas, concepts, publications, or break-through technological innovations. What's your most favourite innovation or project?

You can submit your proposal online or by downloading and filling out forms provided from this page. The winner can win a 10kEUR prize, which will be presented during the JAX, Enterprise Architecture, and Eclipse Forum Europe …

Today I uploaded a batch of pictures into my gallery and I also re-arranged a number of albums into a separate Conferences and Events collection. The latest additions in there (yes, some should have been uploaded some time ago already!):

• EuroOSCON 2005 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Open Source Database Conference 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany
• FOSDEM 2006 Conference in Brussels, Belgium
• MySQL Developer Meeting 2006 in Sorrento, Italy …

Last night I returned home from our internal MySQL Developer Meeting in Sorrento, Italy. The trip again was uneventful (something I certainly don't mind) and I used it to catch up with email and other work that I could not take care of while being at the conference.

The event was very well organized (kudos to Carol and the rest of the team!) and I enjoyed meeting old and new colleagues. It was nice being able to discuss stuff from face to face and hearing about what's cooking at the various other parts of the company in more detail. Too bad that we sometimes had so many tracks in parallel - it was difficult at times to decide which session to attend without fearing to miss something else. I gave a presentation about SUSE Linux (why it's the best Linux distro to use) and how our developers can help to foster our user community.

On Monday evening, we arranged a small meeting with local community users, some of them …

I am excited to announce that the phpMyAdmin project confirmed to be present at the DotOrg Pavilion of our MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara next month. Thanks a lot to Marc Delisle for the quick reply and arrangement of a representative. One more good addition to the excellent program we've already lined up!

By the way, we still have some open slots to give away for interested projects! So if you're a developer or member of an Open Source project that utilizes MySQL, here's your chance to show off your work to a very special audience. The exhibition will be open on Tuesday and Wednesday, but we'll provide each project with one free conference pass that will entitle you to …

I finally managed to hook into our wireless LAN here at our conference hotel. The flight from Hamburg to Naples via Munich was uneventful, I met Jan at Hamburg airport and we bumped into a whole bunch of MySQLers at the Munich airport already. From Naples airport it was another exciting hour to Sorrento in a small bus - I completely forgot that Italians have a slightly different driving style than us germans

I am looking forward to the meeting which officially starts tomorrow. I will be giving a presentation about the MySQL Community work and hope to encourage some more of our developers to become more active in there...

I'm pretty excited about this event, and I'm really disappointed that I'm not going to be able to go. :(

http://mysqluc.com/

Tim, I really will meet you in person one of these days...