“Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to this presentation regarding the acquisition of the company MySQL AB by Sun Microsystems.”

Since my speech on Sun / MySQL integration for about 400 people in Beijing last week, I have been asked a few times about what it’s like to give a speech in Chinese. Well, I wouldn’t really know, as all I did was read aloud a text for 8 minutes. I remembered what passage was about what topic, and I had noted which words to stress, when to raise my hand etc. But of the actual words, I understood perhaps 5-10 % (based on them being repeated often enough). So I know I am a fuzongcai (Vice President) with Sun Microsystems, I know the difference between a kèhù (customer) and a yònghù (user). I live in Munihei (München), but I am not deguoren (German), I am fenlanren (from Finland). And, nüshìmen, xianshéngmen, that’s Ladies and gentlemen.

So far, hen hao.

I read aloud from this paper (no, not the Chinese characters, just the pinyin).

But the ambition level could really be a bit higher. Not stressing every syllable. Speaking a bit faster. Repeating the tones once (ok, five times) more. And I could memorise more words, not 5-10 % but perhaps 25%. That would be more enjoyable for both the audience, and for myself.

That said, giving a speech in Mandarin was a very positive experience, even at my level of delivery. My ambition was for at least 70% of my message being understandable from a pronunciation standpoint, and I heard estimates of the outcome being 80% to 90%. And I got interrupted by applause at least five times, and laughter at least once (even at the intended spot). So I’m happy. And I recommend using Chinese for more than the mere greetings, for any non-Chinese wishing to be well received in China.

Xìexìe, thank you, xìexìe.

References:

• Kaj Arnö speaks Chinese to the Sun/MySQL crowd: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3036893738929286405&hl=en
• Wikipedia: Pinyin (Chinese spelling): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

We had over 400 participants in yesterday’s MySQL-Sun event in China! Plus another 30 or so in the press event, happening in parallel.

Beijing, if nobody noticed, is preparing for the Olympics. Here’s the so called Birds Nest, that we passed several times on the way to various meetings — including yesterday’s event.

After initial linguistic difficulties, Larry Stefonic (MySQL VP APAC) found our way to the event.

This was the first MySQL-Sun event with a banner across a street!

Everything takes place in Chinese here. About as much as it’s Japanese in Japan. In Europe, we seem to give way too much way for English.

And to accommodate to the local situation, I gave my presentation (on MySQL-Sun integration) in Chinese. It was about 8 minutes, and I was happy to be several times interrupted for applause. And I didn’t say anything particularly smart — just read aloud my normal presentation, albeit in Chinese. Judging by the warm reception, that’s not an everyday gesture by Westerners in Beijing.

Now, after nearly three weeks on the road, I’m finally going back home. Hence the popular Chinese gesture: the Thumbs Up sign.

Thanks to everyone who arranged the event — especially, Scott Chen at Sun in Beijing, and Yoko Suga-san with the MySQL APAC team!

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).

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

Twice a year, Sun invites their Sun Fellows, Sun Distinguished Engineers and many Principal Engineers, Sales Engineers and Consultants to an offsite meeting, usually in California and this time in the Chaminade in Santa Cruz. For the first time, we now had MySQLers present — and over 20 of us.

The purpose of the meeting is to share new trends, new technologies, and new ideas across Sun’s wide spectrum spanning everything from the bare metal of the Niagara system through other aspects of system all the way to software.

I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to describe MySQL the Product, MySQL the Business and MySQL the Culture, in a long 90 minute day session in front of all the audience. Our Product, Business and Culture were described by a six-headed panel, with Jim Starkey, Jan Kneschke, Michael “Monty” Widenius, Mikael Ronström, Igor Babaev and Serg Golubchik.

MySQLers in general were very well received, despite our loud newbie comments about how to “properly” address Open Source issues and develop Free Software.

There’s plenty of time to talk one-on-one, and a multitude of Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. We might have been excessive in the amount of MySQL related BOF sessions offered, as I at one point had to ask a colleague where “the Sun BOF” was.

Yesterday, we concluded the Sakila Express World Tour, more aptly named “Sakila Tour of Seven Top European MySQL AB Sites Using Decadence Airlines“. The last two were in Germany: Hamburg in the north, in Sun’s offices, and Munich in the south, in Hilton am Tucherpark.

In Hamburg, we went directly into the meat with three hardcore developers. Onboarding, intellectual property, and contractors were the hardcore topics.

Ulf, Jan and Kay experienced Izhevsk and Kiev vicariously through the blog

The discussions added plenty of colour to the picture for Julie and Dave. Julie has a great metaphor for explaining the purpose of Sakila Express: To understand how the integration message comes out in the other end, in the Telephone game (also known as Chinese whispers, in German as Stille Post, in Swedish as Ryska posten, in French as Téléphone arabe, where the German version is the only one which would pass all tests of political correctness).

Sadly, Dave had to depart for the US after Hamburg, and sadly, Julie and I had to go back to reality from having used the rental jets of our beloved Decadence Airlines, into using normal airlines, in our case Lufthansa.

Lufthansa departs from the “normal” part of the airport in Hamburg

Me getting back to real life, in a real aircraft

The last stop in Munich saw plenty of local MySQLers, but this time also quite a few Sun employees and MySQL community members from Mayflower and other companies.

This time, my thank you note goes to Julie Ross and Dave Douglas. We had a fantastic week together! It was superb to meet with MySQLers, as a team of three, in so many different locations in such a short time. Your comfort zone when travelling was wide, and when in distress (not being allowed into the Moscow hotel without an immigration card, having lost the pilots in Izhevsk, not knowing how much time was left to get to the airport in Kiev), you still were a charm to travel with. You listened to the concerns of the MySQLers with interest, respect and an open mind, and I think I can speak for everyone when I say that your presence was highly appreciated. Well done!

P.S. Julie: Do expect me to verify your knowledge of three key phrases whenever we meet from now on: Nasdrovye, Budmo and Zum Wohl!

Today in Kiev, we had a great time with MySQLers in Engineering and Support. And I got competition in the area of photography from Oleksandr “Sanja” Belkin. Other than that, this blog entry is again of the sit-back-and-relax type, not going into lots of MySQL detail. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t have gone into detail, though, although we saw more churches under the leadership of our Kiev team than we had seen in a long time.

This is how much I like my Sigma 8mm lens

We started the day by looking at Sun’s on-boarding procedures for MySQLers in the Ukraine, sipping tea and coffee at the Hotel President. And we went through Sun’s business model, through the importance of retaining the Eventum systems for Support, about how MySQL-time contractors are managed as part of Sun, as well as other topics familiar from other MySQL locations. Our Sun colleagues noted that our values, topics and concerns seem to be the same across our locations, and that MySQLers across the teams know each other quite well. With our IRC culture, Radio Sakila, our Development Meetings and other meetings, the strong bonds between MySQLers might not be that surprising, but I’m still glad it’s noted by our colleagues at Sun.

After the “formal” meeting (which did conform with ZSP, the Zero Slides Policy), we went for a walk across Kiev. Our first stop was the City Hall, where hundreds of yellow buses were honking their horns.

There was a bus strike going on in Kiev

Valeriy, Alexey, Sanja, Bogdan, Julie, Dave

Then we went on to the main Independece Square, with a statue of a “kosack” leader. Yes, I know, these guys are probably spelt differently in English than in Swedish. But I refer to these fiercely independent guys on horses that carried swords and played the balalaika-like bandura instrument.

A kosack, a horse and myself at Kiev’s Independence Square

Sanja (of Lugansk and Maria Engine fame) has a big camera

Batman

Sanja is from Lugansk, 672 km away from home but next to Kiev’s well-known Internet Explorer monument

I like the Kiev architecture.

The Sofia Cathedral …

… counts as several churches in my book

My favourite St Petersburg architect, Rastrelli, was hard at work also in Kiev

You remember Misha? Misha Bulgakov? Our local MySQLer who helped us in Moscow? Well, guess what, we jumped into a statue of him in Kiev!

Misha Bulgakov and me, both sceptical

Then we went for a Georgian restaurant, famous for a Soviet era film comedy “Mimino” about a Georgian and an Armenian (of whom a Japanese commented “all Russians look alike”). Our Ukrainian hosts educated us about Lviv (famous as Lemberg, from the Austro-Hungarian era), Kamennets-Podolski, Uzhgorod and other cool sights in the Ukraine. Personally, I enjoyed seeing the Crimea eight years ago, and am still looking for an excuse to visit Odessa on the Black Sea coast.

The Georgian and the Armenian from the Soviet comedy Mimino

After dinner, it was about time to head back for the airport. Just ten more churches! So we took the Funiculaire uphill, for a view of the Dnjepr river.

The funiculaire

The view over Dnjepr river

Ten more churches to go

This one counts twice

.ua is EU friendly

Time flew, and we needed to find our way to the hotel, so we took the metro.

Julie on the way down the endless Kiev metro escalators

A Kiev metro we barely missed

Dave, Aleksey and Julie felt I took a picture of their knees

Valeriy, Bogdan, Aleksey and Julie

It’s fun in the Kiev metro

And now, the last leg of the Corporate Jet tour is coming to an end, as we’re landing in a few minutes in Hamburg. Yup, we’ll also do Munich tomorrow, but for that, we will have to take Lufthansa, as opposed to Decadence Airlines, which we’ve used so far. Ah, I have to confess, I could bear with another whirlwind tour of Europe with Decadence Airlines, despite sleep deprivation, not to mention a few issues with the Russian officials in Munich (not getting a visa), Helsinki (getting a visa but incurring huge extra cost), Moscow (not getting an immigration card), and Izhevsk (not having pilots, as the flight was randomly postponed by 1h).

Thank you all Ukrainian MySQLers, especially Bogdan Degtyarov and Lawrentii Novitzky, for excellent arrangements!