Tonight’s New York PHP community meeting was a talk by Philip Antoniades the MySQL Systems Engineering Manager.

With an interesting topic opener “A New Hope” I could not resist to hear Philip’s official MySQL presentation.

Some small points I took away from the presentation.

• Sun is committed to Postgres with Josh Berkus and a team of 20 people.
• Solaris.next is the next version of Sun, I thought that was a cool internal name, be it obvious
• A marketing slide of the highest traffic websites listed Meebo, yousendit, alexaholic, techcrunch, feedburneer, istockphoto and vimeo as reported by Pingdom. Not sure were they get their data, but Google, Yahoo, FaceBook, Wikipedia, MySpace, Fotolog are sites I think of as high traffic. Indeed 3 of these listed sites I’ve never heard of. …

While visiting the CeBit Trade Show in Hannover on 2008-03-06, Kaj and myself stopped by the booth of our new employer for meetings with some of our new colleagues. During our stay, they performed a short video interview with us (in German), to get our take on the MySQL acquisition and what this means to us and our users - it is now available from the Sun@CeBit2008 pages. Enjoy!

Twice a year, Sun invites their Sun Fellows, Sun Distinguished Engineers and many Principal Engineers, Sales Engineers and Consultants to an offsite meeting, usually in California and this time in the Chaminade in Santa Cruz. For the first time, we now had MySQLers present — and over 20 of us.

The purpose of the meeting is to share new trends, new technologies, and new ideas across Sun’s wide spectrum spanning everything from the bare metal of the Niagara system through other aspects of system all the way to software.

I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to describe MySQL the Product, MySQL the Business and MySQL the Culture, in a long 90 minute day session in front of all the audience. Our Product, Business and Culture were described by a six-headed panel, with Jim Starkey, Jan Kneschke, Michael “Monty” Widenius, Mikael Ronström, Igor Babaev and Serg …

On Thursday, the day before the long weekend (Friday being Good Friday, following week Monday being Easter Monday), the Melbourne MySQL Meetup group met, for an event that was not our usual meetup, but that of a Meetup Mashup.

Held at RMIT, I spoke about the recent purchase, what changes, what doesn’t, and how we’re 100% committed to making the same great product even better. After that, Gary Pendergast, spoke about how the support is run, and how nothing changes there, except its becoming beefier! We also had a Sun Campus Ambassador, Zhiqi Tao speak about the campus ambassador program, and how he evangelises Sun technologies at universities (his particular one, being Melbourne University). There is also apparently an RMIT ambassador, who missed the meeting.

After the talk, a pocket of us headed to dinner at the Oxford Scholar. There was much beer to …

All in Melbourne, keep the evening of Thursday, 20 March 2008, free. Why? We’re having a Meetup Mashup, right here in Melbourne, Australia. This is the Sun and MySQL tour around the world!

Details:
Date: 20th March
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: RMIT University (Swanston St)
Room: 10.08.04

Contact Tristan on 0422 501 726 for directions to the venue. (or me, at 0412 593 292 if you have any questions, etc.)

After we’re done at RMIT, discussing the recent acquisition (you’re guaranteed to see Support Engineer Gary Pendergast, and me speak, and answer questions), we’ll head over to the bar nearby, and grab some grub. Its a great opportunity to come and get your questions answered!

Are you already part of the MySQL Meetup in Melbourne? If not, check out the …

Yesterday, we concluded the Sakila Express World Tour, more aptly named “Sakila Tour of Seven Top European MySQL AB Sites Using Decadence Airlines“. The last two were in Germany: Hamburg in the north, in Sun’s offices, and Munich in the south, in Hilton am Tucherpark.

In Hamburg, we went directly into the meat with three hardcore developers. Onboarding, intellectual property, and contractors were the hardcore topics.

Ulf, Jan and Kay experienced Izhevsk and Kiev vicariously through the blog

The discussions added plenty of colour to the picture for Julie and Dave. Julie has a great metaphor for explaining the purpose of Sakila Express: To understand how the integration message comes out in the other end, in the Telephone game (also known as Chinese whispers, in German as Stille Post, in Swedish as Ryska …

Today in Kiev, we had a great time with MySQLers in Engineering and Support. And I got competition in the area of photography from Oleksandr “Sanja” Belkin. Other than that, this blog entry is again of the sit-back-and-relax type, not going into lots of MySQL detail. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t have gone into detail, though, although we saw more churches under the leadership of our Kiev team than we had seen in a long time.

This is how much I like my Sigma 8mm lens

We started the day by looking at Sun’s on-boarding procedures for MySQLers in the Ukraine, sipping tea and coffee at the Hotel President. And we went through Sun’s business model, through the importance of retaining the Eventum systems for Support, about how MySQL-time contractors are managed as part of Sun, as well as other topics familiar from other MySQL locations. Our Sun colleagues noted that our values, topics and concerns seem to …

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 …

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 …

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 …