Would you like to experience a battle between E. F. Codd, C. J. Date, U. M. Widenius, J. A. Starkey and U. M. Ronström? Some of the biggest egos the database world has seen!

Well, I cannot promise you all of the above, especially when it comes to Codd, the father of relational databases (1923-2003). Codd’s colleague Date might also be a no-show, but I think I can promise you Widenius (MySQL, MyISAM), Starkey (Datatrieve, Interbase, BLOBs, MVCC, Falcon) and Ronström (NDB Cluster). During the Wednesday keynote at the MySQL Conference & Expo 23-26 April 2007 in Santa Clara, I will be provoking a fight about what constitutes a database, what’s the right way of doing locking, whether it ever was smart to store BLOBs in a database to begin with, and who ever needs versioning.

Given how I know said egos, I don’t expect it to be hard to throw in a couple of sentences that will fire off a slight disagreement between the gentlemen. And during the course of the discussion, I plan to bring in a few more egos, from Solid and Nitro.

Let the battle begin!

In my blog entry about How to arrange a physical meeting in a virtual organisation, I indicated that MySQL AB would arrange its next Developer meeting early in May 2007. For various reasons, including avoiding a crash with the MySQL Conference & Expo 23-26 April 2007 in Santa Clara, we postponed it to September. Our finalists were Sofia, Heidelberg, Munich and Vienna, where Germany’s Next Top Dev Mtg Location was choosen to be Heidelberg, one of Germany’s most charming cities ideally located at about one hour’s shuttle distance from Frankfurt Airport.

As part of our 2007 overall theme to open up our Development Model, we expect to open up attendance for some external community members. If interested, please email both Lenz Grimmer (Community Relations Mgr, Europe) and myself at firstname@mysql.com.

Coincidentally (honestly!), the Developers Meeting ends on the Tuesday right after the world’s biggest party Oktoberfest has started. So whoever joins us should consider flying into and out of Munich instead of Frankfurt, and spend 3 hours each way on train. And book early, since another 5 999 999 visitors are expected in addition to yourself.