Hello world,

This is a good week to start blogging. MySQL 5.0 is more bug free than ever, we’ve just posted our Call for Participation for the MySQL Users Conference 2006, and I exceeded my 2005 running quota by hitting over 500 km and a new PR on my standard 13 km run.

Besides, last week, my appointment to “Vice President, Community Relations” at MySQL AB was finalised. It won’t be until October before we’ll make an official Press Release about this, but information usually moves more freely through the community and over blogs, anyway.

Being appointed to VP Community Relations at a company with an installed base of over 6 million, and with a user community without which neither the company nor the product would exist, is challenging, to say the least. My humble approach is to continue the tradition of our founders Monty and David, and turbo charge it by increasing the quality and quantity of the flow of information interesting to the MySQL user community.

At a SIGOSSEE (”Special Interest Group in Open Source Software for Education in Europe”) meeting on Thursday, I already had my first external appearance since getting my new position. Some 50-60 education specialists attended my presentation in Stockholm.

But back to MySQL 5.0. Most of the MySQL developers have concentrated fully on getting the 5.0 release bug free already for months, and it is showing results. At the beginning of the week, we had 10 showstopper bugs left, having fixed 7 and got 4 new ones from the week before. As we are strict with the interpretation of what constitutes a showstopper, I can safely say that we haven’t seen any significant inflow of bugs with drastic impact on large user groups for a while by now. With MySQL 5.0 being that stable, I’m looking forward to larger user groups upgrading to 5.0. Translating this to marketing speak, we will very soon do a Release Candidate for MySQL 5.0. In old MySQL parlance, that used to be called a Gamma release.

As for the MySQL Users Conference, did I mention that you can now submit Speaking Abstracts for review? The slow starters have time until 7 November 2005, but at least for my part, I have just made a spontaneous and strangely-timed new year’s resolution to, from now on, start doing things way before the deadline. Let’s see where that ambition takes me. Our Quick Poll on http://dev.mysql.com/ indicates that the top five most interesting UC topics are PHP, New Features in MySQL, Web Applications, Performance Tuning and Java — all getting votes from more than 25 % of the respondents.

Weather has been excellent home in Grankulla. A temperature of 13 degrees and great sunshine was conducive to a new personal record of 1:09:39 on the 13 km run from home to Ikea, Esbo centrum and back home. That’s an OK time for someone like me, given that I mostly talk on phone or with a co-runner (at MySQL AB usually Patrik Backman or Zack Urlocker, or with my son Alexander or daughter Sophia).

Next week, I’m off to SAP TechEd in Vienna. In addition to business meetings, I hope to connect with some of the Austrian models that I took pictures of at the World Bodypainting Festival last July in Seeboden, Austria.

And at the end of the week, already being in Vienna, I’ll take the train to Munich to go to Wiesn (outside Bavaria more commonly known as Oktoberfest), where I plan to take my newly bought Lederhosen into production use.

Pfiat Ei! (*)

Kaj

(*) Bavarian greeting, more or less the closing tag of Grüss Gott.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 18th, 2005 at 15:12 and is filed under MySQL, MySQL Server. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.