As followers of Free / Open Source Software know, there are several ways of being free.

As for free as in speech, look for Wednesday’s keynote at the MySQL Users Conference here in Santa Clara on the US West Coast. It’s by Rick Falkvinge, party leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. Or download MySQL Community Server, it’s free as in speech.

As for free as in beer, sure, again, just download MySQL Community Server, install it, and use it. Old news.

But what if you’re lazy enough not to want to download and install MySQL Server? What if you just want to use an instance of MySQL Serer, installed and provided by someone else, with a simple command like

mysql -h db4free.net -P 3307 -u [username] -p[password] ?

Well, in that case, register for a free MySQL 5.1 plus a free MySQL 6.0 at http://www.db4free.net/

Like it says on DB4Free’s first page:

The db4free project provides a platform for database users and developers from all over the world to exchange experiences, give hints to each other or to discuss. This offer also gives you the chance to learn to deal with databases without having to rent a server for money.

You just create an account, perhaps browse the db4free.net blog, and off you go.

You can run MySQL 5.1 (now in RC) and MySQL 6.0 (still in Alpha; includes Falcon).

Thanks for the beer, Markus Popp!

“We didn’t acquire MySQL to change it, but to learn from it”, or something to that effect, was a line used by Jonathan Schwartz very early on in the Sun acquisition of MySQL. And this seems to be taken seriously. So Sun has appointed teams studying MySQL: our culture, and our way of working from home (70 % of us don’t even have a desk at an office, i.e. permanently work from home, such as me).

I hope to soon share some of the results from the Culture studies. Today, co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius and I were the interview subjects of the “Virtual Work at MySQL” study group under Edel Keville.

We had lots of things to point out, but most things had already been said by the other interview subjects. The two key things that were missing were related to meeting practices: How does MySQL organise virtual meetings? How do we arrange physical meetings?

The first one of those would be worth a blog entry in its own right, but the second one already has one. Called “How to arrange a physical meeting in a virtual organisation“, a blog entry from January 2007 describes a meeting in Berlin in December 2006, which was a bit of a testbed for the large-size Heidelberg Developer Mtg in September 2007.

I stay by my philosophy of being descriptive of how MySQL works (and has worked), as opposed to being prescriptive about how Sun should work. That said, I think the meeting practices documented after the Berlin meeting are probably worthy of a read for several virtual organisations which meet physically from time to time (if it’s politically correct to recommend one’s own blog entries).
References:

• My old blog entry MySQL Heidelberg Developer Mtg: Looking back
• My old blog entry How to arrange a physical meeting in a virtual organisation

The very first UC related parties are over, and the Users Conference hasn’t even started!

The first one was Mårten’s traditional and well-liked MySQL staff party in his garden. The coolest and most community significant one was the MySQL Community Pre-Conference Dinner party, though, as advertised on MySQL Forge Wiki. So we dropped out of Mårten’s party at six, to meet with the community.

There were 48 registered people, and I think even more turned up. And some of the guys who turned up unregistered were from Sun.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz crashes the party and is surrounded by community members and MySQLers alike

Rich Green, Executive VP of Software at Sun, also surrounded by Community Dinner attendees

Given that we’ve got record number of attendees at the UC, I think I will have to speed up my discussions, as I got to talk properly only with Florian Haas and Philipp Reisner of Linbit / DRBD, with Kai ‘Oswald’ Seidler of XAMPP, with Marc Delisle of phpMyAdmin, with Volker Oboda of Primebase, other than the MySQLers, ex-MySQLers and Sun employees. Note to self: Blame the jet lag, as this is my second Sunday 13 April 2008 (having got up in Tokyo at 7, and left Tokyo at 16, and arrived in San Francisco at 9 i.e. 7 hours before leaving).

And it seems I also blew my opportunity of flying Decadence Airlines again anytime soon. I was going to handle the payment using Rich Green’s credit card (Rich had to leave a bit earlier), but the restaurant gave him back the credit card and left me with merely signing a receipt. This isn’t going to buy me any aircraft fuel on Netjets.

Footnote 1: Yes, I was teased all evening for the four days we flew “Sun’s Corporate Jet“, i.e. a rental airplane by Netjets from Dublin via Stockholm, Moscow, Izhevsk, Moscow again, and Kiev to Hamburg in March. But it was good, so I suppose I deserve some teasing.

Footnote 2: I googled for “Decadence Airlines”, and funnily enough, one of the links goes directly to http://www.netjetseurope.com/eng/welcome-to-netjets/. I think I will have to plead guilty to that one.

Friday afternoon, I met with Tetsuro Ikeda-san and Teruyoshi Hazama-san of MySQL’s long-time key partner in Japan, Sumisho. Ikeda-san and Hazama-san taught me about their work on full text search in Japanese.

Senna is an engine for fast full text search in Japanese. The Senna project derives its name from Formula I driver Ayrton Senna. “But he’s dead”, I protested. “Sure, but he is a legend and will always be associated with speed.” I cannot protest there — and the numbers I saw for Senna’s full-text search defend the choice of name.

Tritonn is the combination of Senna into MySQL. The Tritonn name refers to two things: Triton Square in Tokyo, where Sumisho has its offices, and to the fact that MySQL through our dolphin logotype is associated with the sea. Tritonn is spelt with two n’s in order to simplify web search, so as not to be confused with the Greek god Triton (the messenger of the deep, son of Poseidon, god of the sea) and the many other things named after him.

I recommended Hazama-san to meet at the MySQL Users Conference with key guys in MySQL Engineering: Sergei Golubchik who wrote MySQL’s Full-Text Search feature, Peter Gulutzan who knows all there is to be known about standards and character sets, and Alexander Barkov who implements all there is to be implemented about character sets.

Good luck to Senna and Tritonn!

References:

• Tritonn home page: http://qwik.jp/tritonn/about_en.html

My Japan trip was full of meetings, as trips to Japan usually are. One of the most interesting ones was at Sun Microsystems K.K.’s site, with a number of people engaged in building Japanese communities for Sun.

Takashi Shitamichi, Yoko Suga, Natsuki Wakabayashi, Jim Grisanzio,
Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Satoshi Kawai, myself, Toshiro Umetsu, Takanobu Masuzuki

From Jim Grisanzio and others, I learned that Japan is Sun’s most active blogging country outside the US, on blogs.sun.com. And I got reminded of the messages heard many times at numerous Sun meetings: That Sun has Community experts both in Marketing and Engineering. On the contrary, MySQL’s Community Team is a separate entity, outside of both Marketing and Engineering, but serving them both.

And that’s an area where MySQL and Sun has a lot to discuss about, in order to understand if there is something to learn from the other party, and how the learnings can be applied and implemented in practise.

There is at least one area where MySQL can learn and contemplate how to implement Sun’s practices: Developer Marketing. We have never used those two words in combination at MySQL, which at times also means that a certain group of MySQL users fall between the cracks — those who contribute to the MySQL community but work for commercial customers. The Community Team socialises with them at Dev Mtgs (such as in Heidelberg last year) and at the Users Conference, and so do the Sales Engineers, Support Engineers and everyone else working for MySQL. Yet, spending time isn’t the same as concerted efforts.

Conversely, the concept of “user” seems to be different at MySQL and Sun. At MySQL, “user” is often used to mean “non-paying customer”. And these users form the core of the charter of the Community Team. We want to smoothen the way for our users, we want them to use MySQL, to expand their usage of and benefit from MySQL, and to share their positive experiences with the rest of the world. And while working on this, the MySQL Community Team strictly does not have an agenda of convincing the users to pay for something, ASAP. Sure, we want our pay check, and sure, we want MySQL (now Sun) to prosper financially. But our main goal is to fill the invisible pipeline of users who may take months or years at the user stage, before even considering to become paying customers.

Some of this forces top management to have quite a strong belief in the good that a community can have for a company. I’m thinking about metrics. It’s not as if there would be ideal metrics for community building. Or rather, there are ideal metrics, such as the number of project wins, i.e. cases where MySQL is being adopted in new projects. That would be highly relevant to know, segmented by various types of organisations. But we don’t have access to those numbers. Forcing people to register won’t work, and voluntary registration gives only a fraction of the new projects as well as a fraction of the relevant data.

My personal conclusion is that I’d rather have a high adoption rate, than know exactly which low adoption rate I have.

And another personal conclusion is that I’d generally rather spend time increasing adoption further, than increasing my level of knowledge of that adoption. That conclusion is less easy to defend, though, as some level of knowledge about adoption rates is essential.

What’s again easier to defend is that exact knowledge about an irrelevant aspect of the adoption rate may fool one to believe that said aspect is relevant. How significant is download rates? Web page hits? Email list traffic? Number of blog postings? Forum entries? And how much of that is directly driven by the efforts of the Community Team, rather than events outside the control of that team (such as new releases, security holes, acquisitions by Sun)?

Looking forward to various discussions on this topic with Ian Murdock and many other colleagues!

Reference:

• Jim Grisanzio’s blog at http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/mysql_meeting_at_sun_japan

Japan is a wonderful place for someone like me.

Not only do I get to have sushi to my heart’s content. I am also exposed to the wonders of the Japanese culture, and — the topic of this blog posting — Japanese cultural imports from the West.

While preparing for the Sun-MySQL event last Wednesday, I was happy to see the back of Toru Takahashi-san’s laptop, featuring a big sticker with Snusmumriken and a small sticker with Duke.

• Toru-san is a Principal Solution Architect with the Software Practice in Sun Microsystems K.K. He was involved in the planning and execution of the Tokyo event in our Sun-MySQL World Tour. You can also meet him at the MySQL Users Conference next week, if you’re there.
• Duke is the friendly mascot of Java technology.
• Snusmumriken, or Snufkin in English (sorry, I wouldn’t know what he is called in Japanese), is a Finland Swedish cultural export. He is one of the Moomin cartoons (Moomintroll’s best friend, who goes south every winter and returns in the spring), and I did know from earlier travels to Japan that the Moomins are about as popular in Japan as Victoria and David Beckham (exposure in random unrelated ads in the metro or on the streets). Ah, the humble cultural imperialist in me was happy to note that it’s not only IT (Linux, MySQL) which is spreading from our tiny group of 300.000 people in Finland, but also my favourite children’s stories, written by Tove Jansson (1914-2001).

My Finland Swedish ego trip got a further highlight later in the evening, when I noticed that the scissors I borrowed at Larry Stefonic’s place (MySQL’s VP Sales in APAC) were made by Fiskars (in the consumer goods industry).

I’m big in Japan.

I’m small in the US.

In Europe, I am size M.

Me trying out replacement clothes in Tokyo

On my trip to Japan, I thought I was smart by saving money through combining tickets in my fairly complicated trip Munich - Tokyo - Santa Clara - Beijing - Munich. So I booked MUC-PEK-MUC, PEK-NRT-PEK and NRT-SFO-NRT. That meant a stopover in Beijing on my way to Tokyo.

And that, in turn, meant lost luggage.

There was plenty of time to think about whether I would lose my newly-bought suit and my favourite lense (8mm Sigma fisheye) forever, but 59 hours later than myself, the bag finally turned up on the Stefonic residence doorstep in Minato-ku, Tokyo.

In the meantime, I had to buy some emergency clothes and time to make the above observation on clothing sizes: I’m usually M or L in Europe, I’m often S in the US, but in Japan, I had to go for X to XL.

This week’s Wednesday was a big thing for MySQL and Sun in Japan:

• Over 300 attendees to our World Tour event in Tokyo
• Over 30 press attendees to the press conference in the morning
• Availability of nine-to-five MySQL Technical Support in Japanese announced
• Availability of MySQL Enterprise Monitor in Japanese announced
• Availability of MySQL Knowledge Base articles in Japanese announced

I had the opportunity to keynote 60 minutes on the MySQL Architecture of Participation, with the first 5 minutes in Japanese.

Minasama, Konnichiwa.
Konotabi wa, Sun Microsystems toh MySQL AB no Tougou ni tsuite, *Kigaru* ni *Oiwai* shi, *Hanashiau* tameno, Launch Event he, Youkoso Okoshi Kudasaimashita.

[the following four minutes deleted]

Against all hearsay advice for gai-jins, saying that foreigners should not attempt at joking in front of a Japanese audience, I also inserted a small attempt at making the audience laugh towards the end of my presentation:

Minasama wa, Mou, Owakari kato Omoimasuga, Watashi wa Nihongo wo *Hanashi masen*. Desukara, Minasama kara Question wo Oukesuru toki wa, honyaku shi, Eigo de, Kaitou sasete itadakitaito Omoimasu.

For those of you who are in the same unfortunate position as me, not to understand the quote, what I said was

As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, I *don’t* speak Japanese, which means that I’ll rely on translations for understanding your questions, and I will reply in English.

My “limitations” in Japanese were sorely apparent by the time I mentioned that, and surely enough, there were a couple of Japanese chuckles in the audience.

The Q&A then started with an intensity of questions that I am used to from my native Finland, in other words, complete silence. After the first brave Samurai opening up the q&a session, the questions started flowing and were of the same type as elsewhere: What are our plans for storage engines? What does the Sun integration mean? Will Sun change us? Will we stay open source? (Yes, we will).

Thanks to Yoko Suga-san, and everyone at MySQL KK and Sun KK who made this great event such a success!

References from MySQL:

• Yoko Suga’s blog: http://blogs.mysql.com/teamapac/
• Our announcement (in Japanese): http://www-jp.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article_1492.html

References from Japanese press:

• http://opentechpress.jp/enterprise/08/04/09/1352214.shtml
• http://techtarget.itmedia.co.jp/tt/news/0804/09/news05.html
• http://www.computerworld.jp/news/sw/103769.html
• http://itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/NEWS/20080409/298437/
• http://itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/NEWS/20080409/298444/
• http://itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/NEWS/20080409/298555/
• http://release.nikkei.co.jp/detail.cfm?relID=186589&lindID=1
• http://www.nikkeibp.co.jp/news/manu08q1/567758/
• http://it.nikkei.co.jp/business/news/release.aspx?i=186589
• http://enterprise.watch.impress.co.jp/cda/software/2008/04/09/12665.html
• http://japan.internet.com/busnews/20080410/5.html
• http://journal.mycom.co.jp/news/2008/04/09/032/
• http://japan.zdnet.com/oss/story/0,3800075264,20371091,00.htm

Right after Paris, Giuseppe and I turned our attention to Milan, Italy. The flight from Paris Roissy to Milan Malpensa (EasyJet, 57 euros/PAX) turned out to be clearly cheaper than the taxi ride from Malpensa to Sun’s Milan office, where we had the meetup.

In time before the meeting, we had some HR, integration and general planning discussions with Sun. One of the most difficult aspects turned out to be to pick the right form of coffee, as the number of alternatives in the coffee machine exceeded anything observed before.

Luckily, I’m a tea drinker, where the challenge limited itself to finding out how to change the default of adding sugar to drinking the tea straight.

The event saw over 100 participants. It was very competently arranged by Emanuela Giannetta, hosted and supported by Franco Roman and many other Italian Sun people — including Stefano De Toni who presented the GlassFish Application Server and NetBeans platform/IDE projects.

My Italian Meetup-Mashup keynote also marked a first in what I plan to be a regular thing: That I present the key messages, i.e. the first 4-5 minutes, in the local language, even if I don’t speak the language but just pretend to do so. Giuseppe kindly translated my Paris presentation from French to Italian, and we then walked through the difficult passages to pronounce:

Signore e signori, benvenuti a questo incontro informale per celebrare e discUtere l’acquisizione di MySQL da parte di Sun Microsystems.

Mi chiamo Kaj Arnö, e sono il Vice Presidente per la Comunità di MySQL. Vengo da Monaco, ma non sono bavarese. Sono Finlandese come Monty, il creatore di MySQL e molti altri colleghi. Durante l’integrazione con Sun, ho anche il ruolo di Ambasciatore di MySQL, cioè vIsito tutti gli uffici Sun e spiego cos’è MySQL.

[the remaining 90% deleted for your benefit]

You might nOtice some non-standard capitalisAtion of a few words, denoting where to put the stress. How else would a stupid foreigner like me know it’s discUtere and not discutEre?

I didn’t get thrown at with raw eggs and tomatoes (perhaps the audience was just unprepared) so until further notice, I will continue the practice of presenting the beginning of my keynotes in the local language.

References:

• ATLAN66 report in Italian by Eva Balzarotti & Maria Pia Izzo: http://www.atlan66.it/news.htm
• Giuseppe Maxia’s blog entry: http://datacharmer.blogspot.com/2008/04/working-with-sun-love-at-first-sight.html

Last week’s Wednesday (seems like ages ago, and I haven’t got any blogging time since), the Sun MySQL Meetup-Mashup World Tour got to Paris.

The Meetup-Mashup gets a local flavour wherever we are. And the local flavour in Paris was an Irish Pub, where we had an intimate meeting with a good 160 of the closest friends of MySQL.

We had some bière gratuite (free beer) to celebrate the logiciels libres (free software), as well as a presentation by Giuseppe, after a brief introduction by myself and followed by an overview by Sun.

I had good encounters with old friends and made some new ones. Damien Seguy from Nexen.net belong to the oldest, and our discussions ranged from the well-being of the French PHP community to stuffed animals, particularly those depictingo species relevant to FOSS (elephants, penguins, and, let’s not forget, dolphins).

The PHP contingency was probably the biggest developer audience in the group, but Ruby on Rails and Java were also ably represented.

From a community perspective, the most interesting discussions I had with three gentlemen from www.developpez.com: Adrien Artero in charge of the Business Intelligence column (bidvp.com@gmail.com), Nicolas Joseph and Antoine Dinémant. They asked us to help them by identifying the best articles related to MySQL on our website, so that their volunteers can translate them to French and publish them on their developer site. Talk about well-aligned interests! We’re happy to oblige, as we very much welcome spreading the word on MySQL in the languages relevant to the developers — in the case of France, French.

Some notes on www.developpez.com, the French language community that concentrates the largest number of professional IT specialists:

• Provides for free all kinds of useful services for IT specialists: newsletter, magazine, topicality events, tutorials, articles, FAQs, tests, benchmarks, debates, surveys, tools, sources, components and examples of code, blogs, and free site hosting for IT specialists.
• Up to 130.000 visits per day
• More than 1.400.000 distinct readers attend www.developpez.com at least once a month.
• With more than 5000 messages per day, it is also the most active forum of mutual support in its field.
• The largest voluntary editorial team: more than 500 authors.

A great thanks to Mick Carney, our senior Sales guy in France, to Giuseppe Maxia, who organised the event from a community perspective, and, most of all, our long-time French PR agent Véronique Loquet of AL’X Communication, who did an amazing job in planning and coordinating this event.

Looking forward to the next French event, an enterprise event directed at Sun & MySQL customers, happening in June.

References:

• Damien Seguy’s blog: http://www.nexen.net/articles/dossier/18257-rencontre_sun/mysql_du_3_avril_2008.php
• Giuseppe Maxia’s blog: http://datacharmer.blogspot.com/2008/04/meetup-in-paris-mysql-social-event.html