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 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.

One of the most appreciated keynotes at the ongoing Japanese MySQL Users Conference was by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby language.

Me and Matz at MySQL UC Japan Day 1 2007-09-11

Matz was preceded by an impressive set of keynoters, moderated by MySQL K.K. President Larry Stefonic, also Senior Vice President of Asia Pacific at MySQL AB :

• His Excellency Mr. Stefan Noreén, Ambassador of Sweden to Japan
• Mårten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB
• Masahiko Yoshida-san, Director, Hewlett-Packard Japan, Ltd.
• Kenji Mukai-san, Vice President, General Manager, IT Architecture Solutions Unit, Sumisho Computer Systems Corporation
• Hirokazu Seto-san, Senior Manager, Alliance & Solutions, Marketing & Operations, Dell Inc.

Matz carries the title of Fellow at Network Applied Communication Laboratory Ltd. For the predominantly business oriented audience, Matz described the history of Free Software, of Open Source, and of Ruby, mentioning the mandatory names: Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Linus Torvalds, and, for Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson. With Linus, Matz shares the original motivation for starting their respective now-famous Free Software project: Fun!

The presentation was a great success and even Matz’s jokes were translated into English, creating a time-delayed wave of laughter in the non-Japanese part of the audience. I wonder whether my own afternoon session in English will be equally well treated, when translated into Japanese.

A good three months ago, I had the pleasure of being the referee for seven DB egos. Now, the match has appeared as a Dev Zone article:

One of the most popular keynotes of the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007 was called “The Clash of the DB Egos”. It was a fight amongst seven database luminaries, all playing an important role either within MySQL AB or as providers of Storage Engines that work closely with MySQL. This article attempts at giving a picture of what the fight was about, through reciting the egos and the questions posed to them by the referee.

Lately, it has been popular on blogs and elsewhere to portray the relationship between open source and closed source as a non-fight.

• In The Beautiful Game, Bryan Kirschner (who leads research strategy for the Open Source Software Lab of Microsoft) blogs about the MySQL User’s Conference and shares his thinking about why Microsoft and MySQL are working together on a number of applications, including ADO.NET provider Interop, and a Visual Studio plug-in that enables developers to access MySQL data directly from VS.
• In The “it’s not us versus them” meme, Matt Asay (influential Open Source thinker and blogger) describes how Microsoft increasingly point out that “it’s not open source versus proprietary” meme. He argues that it would normally be the new player, not the incumbent player, who one should expect to use this type of argument.

Whatever the reason for anybody to claim it’s not us versus them, I think the winner is the end user — as long as the claim is backed up by actions.

For MySQL, let me say that we’ve humbly done our best to take actions. We’ve worked with Microsoft operating systems and applications since last century. Not long after the release of MySQL (originally under Solaris, then under Linux), the software was released under the Windows operating system. Furthermore, we released an ODBC driver coded in-house; as for connectors to many popular Open Source languages, they’ve been developed by the community, not by MySQL itself. And fast forwarding to this century, we beat Microsoft SQL Server by releasing an ADO.Net driver for MySQL Server quicker than MSFT themselves for MSSQL. This is for the good of the end user, who gets more choice and more opportunities inside the Microsoft ecosystem.

With Microsoft (through Port 25) being a sponsor at the MySQL Conference & Expo, and having met Bryan Kirschner and Jamie M. Cannon (both of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft), I am happy to see that Microsoft is starting to acknowledge MySQL’s importance for the Microsoft ecosystem. “As commercial software companies, MySQL and Microsoft share substantial common ground.”, Bryan says in his blog. There seems to be something positive to what MySQL can do for Microsoft customers, also from the perspective of Microsoft itself.

When it comes to Microsoft and MySQL working together, I think there is more in store for the end user. With official contacts established between the two companies, new ideas are getting floated. Some of them may fly. Expect to hear more later!

At the end of today’s Clash of the DB Egos keynote, I had the pleasure of delivering the following speech:

Monty: When I was a child, my father used to work for the same company as Mike Smith [1] works for now. He told me about the concept of an IBM Fellow, which is considered to be the highest honour a technologist at IBM can achieve. Some of them are Nobel Prize winners, you get the picture. Today, MySQL has decided to honour you, for your work so far, and for the work we hope you will put in for the benefit of MySQL and its Community for many years to come. Thank you for creating MySQL, and for making meaning (like Guy Kawasaki spoke about yesterday [2]). You, Monty, have made all of this possible: the storage engines, the ecosystem, the conference. You’ve inspired and continue to inspire millions of users around the world, whom you’ve given a reliable, performant, and easy to use database that is available and affordable for all. While you might still have to work on the Nobel Prize, you are now the world’s first MySQL Fellow.

Tack [3], Monty!

[1] Mike Smith is the Chief Architect for DB2 and i5/OS and an IBM Distinguished Engineer, as well as an Ego in the Clash keynote
[2] Guy Kawasaki gave a keynote about The Art of Innovation
[3] “Thank you” in Swedish.

Mårten Mickos, MySQL’s CEO, has just handed out the 2007 MySQL Community Awards. Given the growth of the Community last year, we had a number of very good contributors that we would really have wished to honour. This time, our choice fell upon these three community members, to which we stand greatly indebted:

Quality Contributor of the Year: Martin Friebe

“This awards recognizes an individual who has displayed remarkable efforts to not just find and isolate bugs in MySQL, but to provide good test cases and several times actually fix the bug and send us a patch. This individual scores the highest number of points in our Quality Contributor Program officially launched in January.”

Community Code Contributor of the Year: Paul McCullagh, author of the PBXT Storage Engine

“In recognition of outstanding efforts in contributing code and knowledge to the MySQL Community, this award is given to an individual who has not just provided the community with an entire transactional, ACID compliant Storage Engine with a specialty in BLOBs, but also integrated into MySQL’s Architecture of Participation to the degree of providing mentoring on MySQL Summer of Code and replying on the internals@ mailing list with precise answers on the inner workings of MySQL.”

Community Advocate, Communicator and Facilitator of the Year: Sheeri Kritzer

“Recognising achievement in the arena of communicating, connecting individuals, arranging meetings, and being a vocal advocate of MySQL community interests, this individual deserves the longest title of all MySQL Community Award Winners of 2007. This individual has made great contributions through MySQL Camp, through blogs, and seems to be able to respond instantaneously with plenty of insight.”

Thank you, Martin, Paul and Sheeri!