For a change, let me remind you of the upcoming MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara. It’s less than two months from now; it’ll be from Monday 14 April 2008 to Thursday 17 April 2008. Same place as last year: Santa Clara, California, USA.

My reminder is triggered by the fact that tomorrow is the last day for Early Registration, by which conference participation costs 1299 instead of 1499 dollars (or, if you skip the Monday tutorials, 999 instead of 1199 dollars). In short, early registration saves you 200 dollars.

I do think the UC is at least as interesting as last year, and I’m very happy about our line-up of keynoters, which includes Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz, MySQL’s CEO Mårten Mickos, Werner Vogels (Amazon.com), Rick Falkvinge (Swedish Pirate Party), Dick Hardt (Sxip), and Jacek Becla (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). For those of you who didn’t go to OSCON 2007, Rick Falkvinge may be an unknown name, but boy, did he have the full attention of the audience with a message that wasn’t exactly the average conference keynote.

Links:

• MySQL Conference & Expo: http://mysqlconf.com
• Registration: https://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/register

The MySQL All-Company Meeting in Orlando is now over. Many are already back at home (= back at work), and others are in transition. What a meeting!

One of the mildest surprises of the week were the name tags carrying a flag that represented the country of residence, as opposed to nationality. These matters are emotional. While I happen to like Germany, it’s not as if I were German. Teased by others for deserting my native country of Finland, I spent time retaliating at innocent fellow countrymen for their “even more foreign” flag than mine. Max Mether had a French flag. Birgitta Löfberg had a Swedish flag (OK, that’s the least foreign, but still foreign). And, for the largest distance from Finland, Mårten Mickos carried a US flag. Eminently teasable.

Also, on my initial name tag, I had the title “Sr. Director Sales Operations”. However, it turned out not to be an innovative way for HR to tell me about being transferred to a new position, but to be a mere mistake. I must have complained too loudly to our All-Company Meeting organiser, Michael Schiff (whose daytime job includes being “Sr. Director Sales Operations”), since he “rewarded” me by handing out a new name tag:

I happily carried that name tag on the flip side of my real tag throughout the conference, and I got many more jokes and laughs out of the flag that I carried, than the title “Schiff’s Admin.”. Ah, flags have so many connotations.

Michael Schiff: You did a superb job arranging the All-Company Meeting! And remember to calibrate that against the Scandinavian scale, where “not bad” in Scandinavian translates to “great” in American. Thank you! Happy to be your Admin anytime!

This is a week full of changes. It’s been a wonderful week for me, meeting with so many MySQLers, telling the rest of the departments about our Community, having productive meetings, being acquired by Sun, and singing Karaoke with my colleagues from the Legal Team as well as performing drinking songs that get posted on YouTube.

The latest change came today. I’ll put my duties as VP Community Services on a spare flame, and focus on the integration of MySQL into Sun. Title unknown (as we’re still just planning the integration, not executing it), but something like “MySQL Ambassador to Sun”.

We want to take Sun by storm. My task will be to get out the message to Sun. “It’s not that I want you to filter the emails, but …”, said my boss Mårten. And as usual with sentences that start with “It’s not that I want you to”, the exact opposite is meant. So I’ll try to distinguish the requests for “super-important trade events in Muchasransk” from those truly worthy of attention, which I’ll promote within MySQL.

I’ll learn about Sun. I’ll teach MySQL about Sun. I’ll teach Sun about MySQL. As part of that, I’ll visit as many Sun facilities as possible, with a special emphasis on those outside the US (as we’ve got plenty of other MySQL executives and VPs on US soil).

It’s going to be great fun!

Part of what makes me very happy about our Sun deal is the interest Sun has expressed in learning from us. That has been evident in all the various meetings here in Orlando — be it with the founders, with the individual departments, or in front of the entire audience.

So as a way to teach Sun a first lesson, I had prepared a gig for the end of the presentations during the morning. We have a tradition of singing songs in our company, stemming from our Scandinavian heritage. “We take this very seriously”, I had heard Rich Green comment. And I’m happy he meant it in a very respectful manner: Corporate culture is important. Drinking songs themselves are meant to be purely fun, and not taken seriously, although they are surrounded by plenty of fairly rigid tradition.

In order to make it light for our future colleagues from Sun, as well as our own recent recruits as well as others unfortunate enough not to know the simplest of all drinking songs by rote, we prepared a phonetic translation for Helan går and put it up as a slide:

Helan går: Phonetic version (sing this!)

Hell and gore
Shung Hop father Allan Allan ley.
Hell and gore
Shung Hop father Allan ley.

Oh handsome in the hell and tar
hand hell are in the half and four.
Hell and gore <drink now>
Shung Hop father Allan ley

A few of us probably sang that without understanding what the underlying Swedish words actually mean. So this brings me to:

Helan går: Translated version (think this!)

The first drink (”whole glass”) goes,
sing <long expression of joy>!
The first drink goes,
sing <short expression of joy>!

And anyone who doesn’t take the first drink,
will be disallowed the second drink.
The first drink goes!
<drink here and now>
Sing <short expression of joy>

The original version, which is both phonetically correct, and carries the right meaning, goes like this:

Helan går: Original version (learn this!)

Helan går
sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej.
Helan går,
sjung hoppfaderallan lej.

Och den som inte helan tar,
han ej heller halvan får.
Helan går,
sjung hopp faderallan lej.

Links:

• Helan går video & audio on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyZpCs3i71s

Giuseppe Maxia had a stop-over yesterday on his way to the MySQL Staff Meeting. We met for community discussions, and rounded off with Weißbier and dinner in Munich’s famous Hofbräuhaus.

What a fantastic feeling! The Bavarian spirit of joy and happiness has been decoupled from tobacco stench! I’ve always liked the first and hated the second.

So the German non-smoker protection legislation of 1 January 2008 is good news for anyone considering arranging meetings in Germany. You will no longer be “welcomed” at the airport by an offensive smell. Headaches in German restaurants will now correlate mostly with the amount of alcohol you drink.

Germany just became an even better place to work and live.

One week to go! Then we’ll have MySQL AB’s biggest internal meeting ever, with some 400 MySQLers being shipped to Orlando, Florida.

Almost four years ago in 2004, the company met in Cancún, Mexico. A year before that in 2003, we met in Budapest, Hungary. In 2002, we met in St Petersburg, Russia. In 2001, we met in Helsinki, Finland. In 2000, they (I wasn’t on board at that time) met in Monterey, USA. As we met last time in Cancún, we were fewer people in the whole company than last September at the Developer Mtg in Heidelberg, Germany.

I’m looking forward to meeting with all my fellow MySQLers. Besides all the working and catching-up, I expect to do some running with fellow MySQLers, share some photographs, and just enjoy spending face-to-face time.

Right now, I’m preparing for this by looking through and setting the agendas for various meetings with other teams, as well as 1on1 mtgs with my team. And I even plan to create a check-list for random beer encounters and store it in my phone. Few things would disturb me more than sitting on my flight back across the Atlantic, only to realise that I forgot to talk to somebody special, and will need to wait forever to get the next opportunity.

The 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo registration is opened!

Time flies. We’re already at our sixth Users Conference! Looking at the announcement:

Co-presented by MySQL AB and O’Reilly Media, the conference will take place April 14-17, 2008, in Santa Clara, California. The event is expected to bring together over 1,600 open source and database users from some of the most exciting and fastest-growing companies in the world, as well as from the large and active MySQL Community. The program for 2008 will include keynote presentations by Jacek Becla of Stanford Linear Accelerator and MySQL CEO Marten Mickos.

Jay Pipes, our Program Chair, has lead a huge effort in identifying the best out of the near-300 proposals for sessions. And we’re not fully done yet. A few sessions still are in the grey zone, so not all are scheduled. But I suggest you take a look at the program already!

Join us 14-17 April 2008 in Santa Clara, California for the biggest and best MySQL event yet!

Register by 26 February 2008 to save up to $200.

Links:

• UC 2008: http://mysqlconf.com/
• UC 2007: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/mysqluc2007/
• Press Release “Program Unveiled for MySQL Conference & Expo 2008″: http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1885
• Clash of the DB Egos (at UC 2007): Seen the show? Read the article! http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/clash_db_egos.html
• Sessions: http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/schedule/presentations/General
  
• Tutorials: http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/schedule/topic/Tutorial
• Get certified: http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/content/get_certified
• Speakers: http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/schedule/speakers
• Sponsors: http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/content/sponsors
• Exhibitors: http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/content/exhibitors
• Media Partners: http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/content/media_partners
• Hotel & Travel: http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/content/hotel
• Register Now: https://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/register

With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
• Tools: GUI, MySQL Workbench, MySQL Proxy
• Events: MySQL Users Conferences
• Licensing: GPL
• Architecture of Participation, Summer of Code, Virtual company
• Other: Release Policy, Documentation, Use cases

I hope this will make my blog more (re)usable.

(The picture is from this summer, when navigating the way up the Großvenediger, a 3662 m high mountain in the Hohe Tauern region of Austria.)

Local MySQL offices have hosted country-specific user or customer conferences in a number of countries this autumn:

• MySQL K.K. in Tokyo, Japan: MySQL Users Conference Japan 2007, 11-12.9.2007 at the Miraikan
• Linux Data Services in Seoul, Korea: MySQL Users Conference Korea 2007, 14.9.2007
• London, UK: MySQL Northern Europe Customer Conference, 16.10.2007 at the Cavendish Conference Centre
• Munich, Germany: MySQL Kundenkonferenz 18.10.2007 at Hilton Munich City

and we’re continuing this with two more conferences

• Paris, France: Conférence MySQL Europe du Sud 23.10.2007 in Hotel Sofitel Le Parc
• Milan, Italy: Launch of MySQL AB in Italia 8.11.2007 in Grand Hotel Villa Torretta

after which the following big one is The Big One, i.e.

• Santa Clara, California, USA: MySQL Users Conference 2008, 15-18 April 2008 in the Santa Clara Convention Center

We just concluded yesterday’s German Kundenkonferenz, with a packed (despite a local transport strike) main room in the Hilton. For me, the highlight was moderating the Storage Engine panel with Ralf Gebhardt, Jan Kneschke and Kai Voigt as vocal, knowledgeable and fun panelists in front of a very interactive audience. “With delight and a dash of horror” (adapted from a Swedish saying) I’m looking forward to moderating next week’s equivalent French panel. I anticipate that the my preparations will not be limited to a casual look in my Swedish-French dictionary.

The London, Munich and Paris event are/were similar in nature, with content of both technical and decision-maker nature. The Milan launch is lighter on the technical side, mainly an opportunity to meet the team.

Finally, you’ve still got a good week, until 30 October 2007, to propose sessions for the 2008 UC in Santa Clara.

This is a friendly reminder that we have opened our Call for Participation for the MySQL Users Conference 15-18 April 2008 in Santa Clara, California.

Yes, 15 April next year may seem far away. But 30 October this year isn’t. And that’s when the Call for Paper closes.

Some UC 2008 highlights:

• Conference theme is “Harnessing the Power of MySQL”
• We expect to bring over 1,500 open source and database users together
• Over 100 sessions, geared toward many skill levels (novice to expert)

Consider to present, especially if you belong to one or more of the below categories:

• Developer or DBA at an established or up-and-coming company
• Business manager with purchasing authority
• Strategist, business developer, CTO, CIO
• Technology evangelist, scout, entrepreneur pushing their enterprise boundaries
• Researcher, academic, programmer

To learn how to phrase your submission, click on the below picture and remember

• Be creative! Conference participants want to hear about real-world scenarios using MySQL, about ways they can be more productive, or write better code. Please submit original session and tutorial ideas that focus on hands-on instruction and real-world examples.
• Be descriptive! Include in your proposal as much detail about the planned presentation as possible. The more we know about what you plan to present, the better.
• Be specific! Proposals which are vague or cover too much material are unlikely to be accepted. If you think your proposal covers too much of a topic, consider submitting two proposals which split the material into different sessions.