The latest from the MySQL community

There were some funny moments during the conference at Rome University.
Before Marten's arrival, we built an impressive heap of fluff dolphins on the desk.

For convenience, Marten used my laptop (an Apple MacBook) for his presentation, and he remarked about "open source enthusiasts who use closed source software". Mac OSX is, indeed, not open source, but it is the friendlier closed source operating system around. And since I am not a zealot, but I use what is best for me, I can cope withApple. My Mac has all the applications I am used to in Linux, with more pleasant graphics, media, and networking features. This is my personal opinion, and YMMV. Back to the topic.

After the presentation, there was a Q&A session. When Marten said he was ready to take questions, I addressed the audience in Italian, saying that we could …

I think this is going to be really neat: you walk around the streets of San Francisco, for example, with your Android powered phone, en route to your destination 20 blocks away.

You whip out your phone, go to Google Maps, pull up the StreetView (remember this?), which zeroes in on your location using a built-in GPS, and then changes as you move the phone around using the built-in compass.

You then virtually walk the city, looking around, without actually moving an inch (looking for the closest ATM, restaurant, etc, hint-hint?).

Without further ado, let's have a look at this video from Google's I/O Conference for a demonstration?

    This video …

As announced by Eduardo, I have started playing with The Aquarium.
That does not mean that I sleep with the fishes, but that I am playing along with the group. And besides, dolphins are not fishes, but nonetheless they should be at ease in an aquarium.

This blogging is part of MySQL integration in Sun. Slowly but surely we are becoming aware of our surroundings and we are engaging the rest of the Sun communities.

We are learning.

More attention to this survey is coming from Lenz Grimmer MySQL Community Manager for EMEA, and …

As some of you would have recently noticed, I’ve started playing around (I can’t really say using, seeing that its still not a daily basis kind of thing for me yet) with OpenSolaris and NetBeans. Now, Sun is encouraging students to use, review, and blog about these two great products - check out the student reviews contests.

If you’ve not tried OpenSolaris 2008.05, you should probably give it a twirl. Sure, I’ve not installed it on bare metal hardware yet (I’ve been travelling so much, I’m not anywhere near machines), but it works fine inside VirtualBox. NetBeans is great if you’re writing Java, Ruby, PHP, and are connecting to a database - Connector/J for MySQL …

I flew back into Sydney on Sunday morning to give a tutorial at Sun’s Expanding Horizon’s summit. It was a half day tutorial on MySQL Cluster - so a shortened version of the one I’ve given at the MySQL User Conference for the past few years. I had about 15 attendees, all of which had done their homework (It probably help that they were pestered via phone :)

The tutorial went really well. It really helps when everybody has done the homework and already have Linux and MySQL Cluster installed. Everybody got up and running (we used mysql-test-run to start a cluster, not writing the config file from scratch, which made things happen a lot faster). Also got some good feedback - yay! We may even have some people look to deploy it after attending, always a plus.

I also gave a “Scaling MySQL” talk that was well attended. I didn’t talk at all about query optimisation, mysqld configuration tuning or stuff like that - instead …

From May 28th-31st, the annual LinuxTag will take place in Berlin, Germany. I followed the growth and evolution of LinuxTag from the very early days and I have fond memories of the event back when it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern and our SuSE "booth" was just a regular table taken from the lecture rooms...

Things have evolved a lot since then. Today, LinuxTag is one of the largest Linux/Open Source Events in Europe and my new employer Sun is a major sponsor this year. In addition to several talks and keynotes, there will be a large Sun booth in the exhibition area (Booth #205) and we will have a dedicated MySQL demo pod! Some of the things we plan to demo there are the upcoming MySQL Server releases (5.1, …

Sun Microsystems - Australia - APAC Extended Horizons Summit 2008

I’m giving a Cluster session tomorrow (Sunday) and talking about Scaling MySQL on Monday. Hope to see you there!

At the MySQL Conference and Expo, right after my participation in scaling up or scaling out keynote panel, I talked to Sun's Multimedia team about Sun and MySQL in our environment.

Recently, I found the interview on Sun's Multimedia page. The video of my discussion is embedded below:

Marten Mickos will visit Rome on May 30th. He will meet the press and customers in the morning, and will be the main guest at a conference hosted at La Sapienza, Rome well known University.