Yes, I know. JavaOne is about Duke, the friendly mascot of Java technology. Created and maintained by James Gosling and all.

But MySQL also introduces Sakila to the JavaOne attendees. Sakila is also friendly, and the mascot of MySQL technology. The dolphin was chosen by MySQL founders Michael “Monty” Widenius and David Axmark, as was its name Sakila (which came from a naming contest in the early days).

Together with Giuseppe (in the picture above) and the rest of the MySQL Community Team, I will be handing out incarnations of Sakila (also seen above in the pic) at CommunityOne and JavaOne as follows:

• Monday 5 May 2008 09:30-10:45: CommunityOne General Session: Ian Murdock, Sun Microsystems; Panel: Matt Asay, Alfresco CNET, Mårten Mickos, MySQL, Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation, Ted Leung, Python, Stormy Peters, OpenLogic; Rich Green, Sun Microsystems
• Monday 5 May 2008 12:25-13:20, Moscone South - Esplanade 307: S297794 Creative Programming with the MySQL Management System, Giuseppe Maxia, MySQL
• Monday 5 May 2008 13:30-14:25, Moscone South - Esplanade 307:
  S297257 Scaling MySQL, Scott Feldstein, Hyperic
• Monday 5 May 2008 16:00-16:55, Moscone South - Esplanade 307: S297136 Streamlined Web Applications with MySQL Cluster and mod_ndb, John David Duncan, MySQL
• Tuesday 6 May 2008 15:20-16:20: TS-7813 The MySQL JDBC API Driver, And Making It Do What You Want, Mark Matthews, Darren Oldag, MySQL
• Tuesday 6 May 2008 16:40-17:40: TS-7814 MySQL Cluster and Java Technology (and Python, and Ruby, And…), Monty Taylor, MySQL
• Tuesday 6 May 2008 19:30-20:20: BOF-5039 JDBC 4.1 Specification Overview, Lance Andersen, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Mark Matthews, MySQL

Ah, and rumour has it that Jonathan may pop in during Giuseppe’s presentation!

Come, ask a smart question, interact, and get a Sakila!

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.)

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.

On Thursday/Friday this week, I visited Linbit in Vienna. They are the creators of DRBD. Quoting Wikipedia,

DRBD is an acronym for Distributed Replicated Block Device. It is a Linux kernel module, that, working together with some scripts, offer a distributed storage system, frequently used on high availability clusters. DRBD works as a kind of network RAID.

This means DRBD can give high availability to MySQL users. Through configuring DRBD to be used on your system, you can have synchronous replication between two different servers, giving a MySQL database a failover server to redirect to instantaneously, should the main server running MySQL fail.

For those interested in more detail on how to combine DRBD and MySQL, let me mention that Kristian Köhntopp of MySQL has written a great blog article on “Quick tour of DRBD“.

I was impressed when listening to DRBD’s main author DI Philipp Reisner describing the technical workings and business opportunities of DRBD. In many respects, he reminds me of our very own Monty years ago.

I also learnt plenty of things from Florian Haas, Senior Software Engineer with Linbit. Among other things, he taught me that r is a vowel (in many of Austria’s neighbouring countries), meaning that you can pronounce DRBD without spelling out the letters. Sounds like “Good day!” in Slovenian.

On a more serious note, I think the prospects for DRBD look fascinating. Or in other words, remembering my recent insight on vowels: DRBD rcks!