After Dublin, our next stop on the World Tour was Sweden. While several MySQLers were out on travel (in Dublin, amongst other places!) related to the Sun-MySQL integration, we had the opportunity to meet with Swedish MySQL employees from various parts of the organisation, including Sales, Engineering, Support, and Internal IT.

Yesterday’s dinner at Domtrappkällaren was a memorable one, with an opportunity to share war stories and anecdotes with our Sun colleagues Dave Douglas and Julie Ross. They got their fair share of tales from past MySQL Developer Meetings (ah, Prague! ohh, Sorrento!) and Staff Meetings (you wouldn’t believe what happened to this new guy in Sales on his first day, when arriving at his hotel room in Cancùn).

Equally important, we took time to look at what will happen next. Swedes will in short order be on-boarded, which involves everything form signing papers to getting their first salary from Sun, as …

“If you’d like to get out of the aircraft quickly, and we’re not around to help you, grab this red handle on the door and pull it up.” Our friendly pilot just gave us his friendly security instructions at take-off from Dublin airport, on the way to Bromma in Stockholm. Dave Douglas, Julie Ross and myself are heading on the first leg of our trip to meet MySQL personnel across Europe.

I’ve been frequently teased about using “Sun’s Corporate Jet”. Flying around on that one is certainly perceived as glamorous, and perhaps not compatible with the humble roots of MySQL. Well, glamorous or not, here we are, three people, three empty seats and two pilots up in the sky. However, it’s not exactly “Sun’s” jet. It’s Netjets, more like a taxi than a company car. We’re going to have a different pilot tomorrow, and a different plane. That said, I do enjoy it and I took my favourite gadget, my 8mm fisheye lens, …

No, its not alphabet soup. Just some notes from the session at the Sun Tech Days. I’ve not looked at DTrace much (my only look into instrumentation, has been from SystemTap, which doesn’t deal with applications), but plan on doing so soon… I’ve managed to get OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 installed in VirtualBox, so it can only start being more fun from here…

Want to learn more about DTrace and MySQL? Then come to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, in Santa Clara, California, because on Thursday, Ben Rockwood, from Joyent, will be presenting a session on DTrace and MySQL (read the abstract, its good). The talk covers the fact that you can get useful information currently, …

One of the more interesting features of MySQL‘s JDBC driver is the fact that much of it the functionality it has it alterable or outright replacable by the end user without changing any of its code.

The network sockets can be replaced, the logging can be replaced, the usage advisor feature‘s reporting can be replaced, one can plug into connection lifecycle events (creation, destruction, autocommit state change, transaction boundaries, etc), and functionality can even be injected pre-query or post-query, all without changing a line of code in the driver itself.

I‘ll be showing how all of this works at the 2008 MySQL Conference. Some of the things I demonstrate will be for “fun“ (rewriting simple queries, supporting syntax other than SQL), other for “profit” (profiling, extrusion prevention, injecting bad behavior for system testing). …

Are you close to Munich? Are you available next Friday afternoon? Would you like to meet some MySQLers? And some Sun employees, whom we hope to lure from Sun’s German headquarters in Heimstetten?

Then, come to the Hilton where many of the Bundesliga football clubs stay when playing against FC Bayern München: Munich Hilton am Tucherpark, close to Englischer Garten.

I suggest you to be there at about 14:30. We theoretically start at 14, but two Sun execs and I are arriving late from Hamburg that same afternoon. We expect to be there by 14:45.

What will we discuss?

Well, the setup is the same as for many other meetups, between MySQLers, customers, community, and Sun employees. We’ll tell you that we’re continuing our support of all popular operating systems, and all popular development environments — just like we’ve stressed elsewhere. We’ll share our thinking on what will change and what will stay the …

I didn’t get to attend many sessions at the Tech Days, as I was mainly meeting with people, or at the PostgreSQL on Solaris booth (figures someone from MySQL should’ve been there too). I had plenty of interesting conversations with Tom Daly; we met by chance since I had a blue MySQL shirt and he figured he’d be cheeky and offer me a PostgreSQL one.

I was going to take a photo with him today, but he called me from the airport last night to say he had to go back. Oh well.

Laurie Wong, and me

Instead, you get a photo of Laurie and me (MySQL cap, PostgreSQL on Solaris t-shirt). I’ll blog later about the sessions that I did attend - I wish I could’ve done so earlier but staying at the Sheraton in Darling Harbour, meant that there was no in-room Internet access. …

A ''tipping point'' is a concept, product or idea that becomes a hot commodity that attracts everyone's attention, interest or inspiration. There are always specific reasons and factors that are not easily identifiable why one product becomes a tipping point and others do not. Products not considered a tipping point usually never become a tipping point and ofter never understand why they didn't

I have not been at CeBit for quite a while, but this year I will be there as a regular visitor this Thursday (6th of March). If you would like to meet with me, please send me an email or ping me via IM/Skype! I look forward to walking around the hallways, visiting my new employer's booth and finding out what other Open Source presences and activities there will be.

I’m at the Sun Tech Days Australia 2008, these few days, in Sydney, Australia. Its March 4th - 6th, and if you’d like to catch up, it looks like there are free evenings, from the agenda. At the event, I’ll be the guy donning MySQL attire, of course ;)

Expect blog posts, photos (I’ve got my pocket camera), and more soon. Don’t know if my expensive room at the Sheraton Four Points has free Internet (how much you want to bet, it doesn’t).

If you want to meet me, or catch up, don’t hesitate calling me at +61433 580 941.

Technorati Tags: sun tech days, sydney, …

Since well before I joined MySQL in 2001, I have had contact with now-members of the four-headed management team of Germany’s top-notch PHP experts and solution providers Mayflower GmbH.

Mayflowers and MySQLers frequently pop into each other at PHP conferences and other Open Source events, and meet informally under various circumstances ranging from Christmas parties to Biergarten discussions. It’s always interesting to exchange thoughts on virtual companies, Open Source, business models, IRC, scrum, and finding developers (some of which have worked for both MySQL and Mayflower, incidentally). And by sheer coincidence, Mayflower’s Munich headquarters is now about 150 metres from where I live, in the same street that I look out at from my home office (Mannhardtstr.). This time, they copied us, though — I …