I'd like to bring two announcements to your attention, that I posted to our internals Mailing list a few days ago - both refer to ongoing activities at MySQL AB to further open up our development processes and to establish an Architecture of Participation around the MySQL Server and related applications.

I am excited to be able to talk about this topic at the upcoming FrOSCon, which will take place on August, 25th-26th in Sankt Augustin, Germany. The title of my presentation will be "Opening the doors of the Cathedral - Enabling an architecture of participation around the MySQL Server". Here's the abstract:

Even though the MySQL Server is released and distributed as Open Source Software (OSS) under the GPL, the development itself so far has mostly …

For the curious, the slides for the eLiberatica 2007 presentations are now up at http://eliberatica.ro/2007/ - the slides include presentations from eZ CEO Aleksander Farstad, Brian Behlendorf, FSF Europe President Georg Greve, Ubuntist Kurt von Finck and MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius (and yours truly, but the slides are a bit weak - check out my …

While MySQL already provides some functionality to store and operate on geospatial data, the functionality leaves quite a lot to be desired and is far from providing full OpenGIS compatibility. Most notably is that all functions that query spatial data only operate on MBRs (minimum bounding rectangles), to simplify the operations.

Thanks to my colleague Alexey "Holyfoot" Botchkov from Izhevsk, Russia, some of the spatial relation functions like INTERSECTS and WITHIN now work in the way they are described by OpenGIS and not by using MBR's as it used to be. He has been working on improving the GIS functionality as a side project and the work has now reached a level at which he is ready to give it some public …

I’ll be attending the Openmind conference from October 2nd to 3rd and will be giving a keynote at the event.

Openmind is being organized by COSS, an interesting Finnish Free Software and Open Source development agency that helps Finnish and Scandinavian businesses and projects use and develop FLOSS.

Other keynote presenters at the event (that readers of this blog may know) include Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, Aleksander Farstad, CEO of eZ Systems AS and FLOSS researcher Rishab Aiyer Gosh.

I also hoping that since Monty is in the area, he will also be able to attend.

…

This thought has been floating around my head for quite some time now and I finally bit the bullet and released it from the draft state it had been sitting in for too long: there are quite many similarities between Open Source Software (OSS) projects and most of today's popular Web 2.0 sites, but there is also one odd difference that I wonder about.

For both worlds, the concept of collaboration, participation and giving more power to their users is a key component. OSS projects need contributors for patches and bug reports, but also for feedback, translations, artwork, advocacy in order to be popular and healthy. The project's developers need to be open for suggestions, listening to their user base on where the project should be heading. They also usually strive for open standards …

Just a quick reminder for those of you located near Hamburg, Germany: on Monday, June 4th at 19:00 there will be our 7th MySQL Meetup. As usual, we will gather at the Chinese Restaurant "Ni Hao". This time, Sönke Ruempler will give a talk about the PHP-ORM-Framework "Propel". If you'd like to join, don't hesitate to RSVP via meetup.com or Xing.com right away! Thanks - see you there!

...is something that you influence what it will be.

The problem with replication is that we have so many things that we want to do, but we are not that many people. What we do is what everybody does when the to-do list is to long: prioritize. Since the replication features are developed for you (yes, you), we have added a quickpoll on the http://dev.mysql.com/ where you can pick the three most important replication features that you would like to see us focus on next (after the 5.1 GA).

Do you think that on-line checks for table consistency is for weenies that cannot write a simple little script to do that? Please tell us that.

Do you prefer to live on the edge and think that semi-synchronous replication is for safety junkies? Well, we'll be glad to hear your opinion.

Do you think that the YouTube …

It was long overdue, but now it has happened: Planet MySQL now provides a section to aggregate french blogs about MySQL! Thanks a lot to Jay for updating the code and Pascal Borghino for the localization. If you are a MySQL enthusiast located in France (or any other french-speaking country) and you enjoy writing about your passion in your native language, submit your feed now!

This week I'm attending the second of two developer conferences on my schedule for this month. I noticed an interesting trend that I hadn't seen discussed anywhere else before. Nearly every presenter is using some kind of virtualization technology to give their talks.

This is a terrific idea -- it's awesome to have a more or less pristine copy of your development environment that you can put into cold storage and spin up right before your talk is slated to begin.

I'm not sure why it's taken until 2007 for this kind of virtualization to reach a tipping point, although it might have something to do with the success of Parallels on the Mac -- as well as the fact that Microsoft released Virtual PC as a free product last year. (Although I should mention that I overheard more than one conversation at VSLive two weeks ago from presenters who were slagging Virtual PC's performance.)

I'd be willing to bet that this trend will work …

Fortune Cookie at the MySQL Pre-Conference Party.