After a long pause in the speaking game, I am back.

It's since April that I haven't been on stage, and it is now time to resume my public duties.

• I will speak at MySQL Connect in San Francisco, just at the start of Oracle Open World, with a talk on MySQL High Availability: Power and Usability. It is about the cool technology that is keeping me busy here at Continuent, which can make life really easy for DBAs. This talk will be a demo fest. If you are attending MySQL Connect, you should see it!
• A happy return for me. On October 27th I will talk about open source databases and the pleasures of command line operations at …

I have just started a blog in Italian. Although Italian is my mother tongue, most of my technical writing is in English. Since my tasks are more widespread than a single country, it was easier and simpler to write in English straight away.

After Sun acquisition, the MySQL presence in Italy is growing, and then it makes sense to employ my birth speaking abilities to spread the word in my country.

Today, thanks to a convoluted introduction, set in motion by Kaj and Google Translate, I started contributing to Giuseppe Guerrasio's blog, pettinix.org, with a post on …

He started talking …

Given that I don’t speak Italian, it may seem a bit strange that I just started an Italian language blog on http://blogs.arno.fi/dolce_vita/:

But I do have a point with my blog. Let me quote Google Translate’s automatic translation of some of my “writings” — deliberately doing so without making any improvements on the automatic translation:

Why this blog?

“Of all the languages that I do not speak, I speak Italian the best.”

This is my motto when it comes to speaking Italian. Moreover, Italy is my favorite …