Lenz made a good summary of the DotOrg Pavilion exhibitors at the Expo part of the MySQL Conference & Expo ten days from now. To recap, the DotOrg Pavilion is a part of the exhibition area reserved for Open Source projects. Our attempt has been to collect the DotOrg pavilion to be a mecca for OSS enthusiasts, writers, speakers, and advocates. We are fortunate to have attracted some of the world’s most recognised free software organisations, and new up and coming projects.

A related type of reason to register for the conference are the BOF sessions. Birds of a Feather sessions are the informal evening sessions where people sharing an interest meet face to face. You can still organise your own BoF. There are sixteen BoFs already:

BoFs Monday evening 23 April 2007

• MySQL Data Warehousing and BI, Lance Walter, V.P. Marketing, Pentaho Corporation

BoFs Tuesday evening 24 April 2007

• Backup and Recovery of MySQL, Paddy Sreenivasan, VP of Engineering and Co-founder, Zmanda, Inc., Zmanda, Inc.
• Using Perl’s DBD::mysql, Giuseppe Maxia, QA Developer, MySQL AB
• SNMP/AgentX Management of MySQL Servers, Mark Atwood
• MySQL Replication, Lars Thalmann, Replication and Clustering Technology, MySQL, Jeremy Cole, MySQL Geek, Proven Scaling LLC, Mats Kindahl, MySQL AB
• Testing Tools and Techniques, Giuseppe Maxia, QA Developer, MySQL AB
• Scalable BLOB Streaming Infrastructure, Paul McCullagh, CTO, SNAP Innovation GmbH
• Performance Tuning and Optimization, Peter Zaitsev, Co-Founder, Lead Consultant, Percona Ltd, Tobias Asplund, Instructor and Performance Tuning Consultant, MySQL AB, Jay Pipes, Community Relations Manager, North America, MySQL AB

BoFs Wednesday evening 25 April 2007

• MySQL Cluster (NDB), Stewart Smith, Cluster Developer, MySQL AB
• Quality Contribution to MySQL, Giuseppe Maxia, QA Developer, MySQL AB
• Making It Real in the Enterprise: Migrating from Access to Enterprise Web 2.0
• All Things .NET, Reggie Burnett, Software Developer, MySQL AB
• MySQL and Java, Mark D. Matthews, MySQL AB
• Online Backup, Lars Thalmann, Replication and Clustering Technology, MySQL, Charles Bell, Senior Developer, MySQL AB
• Pluggable Storage Engine API, Brian Miezejewski, Principal Consultant, MySQL Inc., Brian Aker, Director of Architecture, MySQL AB, Trudy Pelzer, Project Engineering Manager, MySQL AB
• MySQL Monitoring and Advisory Service Unleashed—Come Make Your Mark!, Andy Bang, Director of MySQL Network, MySQL, Rob Young, Senior Product Manager, MySQL Network

Please check the “Birds of a Feather Sessions” message board located in the Conference Registration Area for up-to-the-minute changes and information.

From time to time, MySQL employees are approached with proposals from universities and other research institutions about MySQL participating in research programmes financed by governmental initiatives in the US and in the EU. This is much appreciated. Often, there is a mutual interest, where

• academics need an industrial partner to anchor the results of the research into a real-world application and even to fulfil the requirements of getting a grant, and
• the MySQL user community needs new features in MySQL Server, or in the Connectors enabling the use of MySQL from various development environments.

Left: MySQL University refers to the highest form of education when it comes to learning how to develop MySQL Server (as opposed to using it). It’s opening up for the MySQL community to attend, at no cost.

So what do I suggest you to do, if you’re drafting a Framework Programme proposal (these are collaborative research projects funded by the European Commission) or equivalent other type of application involving governmental funding, and you think MySQL (whether AB, Inc., GmbH or KK) would be a possible industry partner?

• First, think about how your research can end up as a benefit for the MySQL user community. Who needs it? To fulfil what requirement? Why is your project going to end up in deliverables that are usable by the MySQL ecosystem?
• Second, think about what MySQL can do to help. We have limited resources for developing MySQL Server further, and we deploy them carefully. However, we absolutely want to help, if your research proposal provides good answers to the primary questions above. We are more likely to be able to help, the more concrete the contribution of the research partners is.
• Third, email me or anyone else in the MySQL Community Team, at firstname@mysql.com. Or if you happen to know someone at MySQL, or you know of a MySQL employee close to your geographic location, approach that person — who in turn will approach the Community Team at MySQL. We will then act as your contact persons and primary interface towards our development organisation, who in turn are the domain experts in Data Warehousing, High Availability, Geographical Data, Clustering, Replication, or whatever the specific domain of your research is about.

While none of us in the Community Team has yet acquired a PhD, we’ll connect you with those MySQLers who have — once we’ve determined that your research proposal has a common goal with what MySQL is trying to accomplish.