It was a beautiful day to start with, but rain and thunderstorms did mess with the barbeque planning Germans are famous for. So, lots of people attended Web Montag yesterday!

Darren Cooper opened Web Montag this time. He repeated a few times "1st of September", which is the next meeting in Frankfurt. For next events he really want to see more non-technical presentations. I think that's indeed a good thing. Darren also got some good jokes, seriously!

Andreas Demmer was first speaker, talking about Presentation Zen. It made us, the other speakers look bad afterwards.. just kidding! I knew bits and pieces about this approach for doing presentations, but it's what it is: an approach, not a …

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 …

MySQL is featured on the Google Open Source Blog
Just after leaving JavaOne, Leslie pinged me on IRC to inform me that the MySQL project was featured on the Google Open Source blog. Go on, read Moments of Inspiration.

In other news from mentors, Colin Charles, former mentor and 2008 organization administrator for MySQL dropped a note to let us know that their Community Bonding period is moving along swimmingly. So well, in fact, that their students are already delivering weekly status reports. Colin mentioned that …

If you are working with MySQL as a DBA or developer, I'd like to encourage you to consider taking the MySQL Magazine Survey, which was compiled by Keith Murphy and Mark Schoonover.

The survey takes around 10-15 minutes to complete and runs until June 16th. The results will be published in the summer issue of MySQL Magazine, due on July 15th. The questions cover a broad range of topics, from details about your MySQL experience and job description over connectors and languages to operating systems and MySQL versions.

Thanks in advantage for your support and input! The results of this survey will be interesting for us as well.

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, …

Maybe it’s a coincidence but this week has seen evidence of tension between commercial open source vendors and elements of the open source user community. Matt Asay stirred up something of a hornet’s nest with his post questioning how open source vendors can find ways of encouraging users to contribute either code of cash in return for free software.

The question itself might be innocuous but Matt’s use of the term “free-riders” prompted a couple of angry responses. Storm in a tea-cup stuff really.

Meanwhile, in a unrelated …

“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”
— Howard Aiken

MySQL is back on Open Source track and that is definitely the best news for all (including community, MySQL and Sun as well). I think that now Sun/MySQL have agreed to the importance of community, it becomes community's responsibility to give them more reasons to believe so. Let's participate like never before.

Kaj, in his post says "...model to be useful for both those who spend money to save time, and those who spend time to save money". This is what Open Source is, isn't it?

All in all, a decision most awaited and …

Brian Moon suggest that community provided example my.cnf files would be a great thing to have on MySQLforge in this recent post: http://doughboy.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/example-mycnf-files/

I pulled out the "innodb heavy" config sample file and modified it with the standard settings that I typically start with when setting up a new InnoDB master. I've also modified the comments in the file a bit and have added some of my own too. I removed the sample slave configuration parameters (master-host, etc) because you should be using 'CHANGE MASTER TO'.

He suggested tagging such files with a 'mycnf' tag and very kindly tagged mine after I posted it :)

Feel free to share yours too and please feel free to make any comments about my configuration choices.

You can find it here (along with any other mycnf …

Note: these are live notes. It was a great talk, I’d rate it as excellent (and I’m not just saying that because Josh and I work in the same group at Sun). I’ll have to also comment on his thoughts and talk, in due time. MySQL, as an open source project, has a lot to learn.

Ten Ways to Destroy Your Community
A How-To Guide
Josh Berkus, Community Guy

Part 1: The Evil of Communities

• you may attract and will be unable to get rid off a community
• they mess up your marketing plans, because the community goes out and does its own marketing and PR and distributes your software in places you didn’t expect to
• they also mess up your product plans, because they contribute to code and features to your project, with unexpected innovation!
• communities are never …