Today in Izhevsk, we had the best welcome a group of Sun-MySQL integration people could ever imagine. “As you’ve been flying a Corporate Jet, you now need a corporate car”, our reception committee said.

And, we travelled in style. After some shampanskoye, we were shuttled into the white limo (somehow exported from the US into Izhevsk) fixed by the local MySQLers.

Today’s Tip #1: If you look for meaty MySQL stuff, look elsewhere. If you look for travel tips for Russia, read this report of one of the most exciting day trips I’ve had in my life.

The Royal Welcome in Izhevsk

Today’s Tip #2: If you want to go to Izhevsk, then start in Moscow, fly due east towards the Ural mountains, and land after two thirds of the distance. Be sure to bring a Russian speaking co-co-pilot.

The first red carpet that has literally been rolled out for the MySQL Ambassador to Sun

Today’s Tip #3: If you want to pronounce “Izhevsk” and get away with it, pronounce the “zh” as the “s” in “pleasure” (which going to Izhevsk was at least for us).

I’ve been in a limo once before, in New York, but this was clearly the more fun one.

Wannabe-Izhevsk-employee Lars Thalmann pays for our dinner with a smile

The MySQL Izhevsk office has the corner room with the best view of all MySQL offices /me has seen

After having a great dinner (I had broccoli soup and a delicious sturgeon with black rice) and sending the latest emails and blog entries from the wireless in the Izhevsk office, our local hosts guided us to the local sights. The first one is the Kalashnikov museum. A must!

/me in front of the Kalashnikov museum

My main goal in the Kalashnikov museum was to see an AK-47.

Today’s Tip #4: This is how to decipher the code AK-47: A as in Automatic, K as in Kalashnikov, 47 as in 1947 (similar branding to Windows 95).

The majestic entrance to the Kalashnikov exhibitions

And an AK-47 could be observed right from the beginning, as could the Windows error messages “File not found” in the video shows above the booths with soldiers from various centuries.

Mission accomplished: Kaj with an AK-47

The AK-47 is very similar in design to the Stg (Stormgevär) I used in Dragsvik serving in the Finnish army 1983-84. In fact, the AK-47 was commercially licensed to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries. According to our local MySQLers, the Chinese used the GPL version.

A modern-day AK-47, the Nikonov from 1994

Having seen the Nikonov, we looked out for the Kanonov, but found neither that one nor the Hasselblattov.

After that, we went for a test of how much we trusted our co-workers. There’s a shooting range in the basement, where you can pick amongst sniper guns, handguns and an assortment of other guns produced in the belligerent city of Izhevsk.

Dave Douglas, Julie Ross and Alexander Barkov prepare for the shoot-out

Dave Douglas trains in the usage of backup motivational methods for making the Sun-MySQL integration work

/me tries the Big Mac of the Izhevsk guns — the AK-47

Today’s Tip #5: If you want to try out plenty of guns with little waiting time, at a low cost, and without signing heaps of legal indemnifications, go to the basement of the Kalashnikov museum in Izhevsk, the capital of Udmurtia, wear protection for your ears, and be sure to really trust the colleagues you’re going with.

After this much aggression, we had to go for more peaceful activities. Last year, the rebuilding of the cathedral of Izhevsk was completed, based on the original from around 1908 which was, ehh, deleted in the 1930s.

Alexander Barkov going up the stairs of the “chram” (cathedral)

Gospodi pomiluy! Lord have mercy! The contrast to the shoot-out couldn’t have been bigger. We came into an orthodox mass with kneeling locals, sacral music and an atmosphere of complete tranquility.

An orthodox service in the cathedral of Izhevsk

The atmosphere in Russian Orthodox churches is peaceful

Today’s Tip #6: If you want to have a look at the frozen pond in the Izh river, early March is a good month, and the central square of Izhevsk is a good spot.

The pond on the Izh river through Izhevsk

But all good things must come to an end. Ours came at 19:30, when we had to be back at Izhevsk airport, to catch the flight which we had booked for 20:00. You may have your own set of excuses for missing flights and flight times, but we ended up with a novel one: By 20:10, the pilots hadn’t yet arrived. By 20:15, movement was sighted in the airplane and by 20:20, we had noticed the mixup being due to the one hour time difference between Izhevsk and Moscow.

Kaj, Dave and Julie departing from Izhevsk — a day trip we’ll never forget!

Anyway, it worked out, and we’re now on our way to Kiev, in the Ukraine, with a short stopover in Vnukovo, Moscow.

Let me conclude by thanking our local MySQLers Alexander “Bar” Barkov, Alexey “Holyfoot” Botchkov, Ramil Kalimullin, Sergei Vojtovich, Sergei Glukhov, as well as the co-visitors Georgi “Joro” Kodinov from Bulgaria and Lars Thalmann from Sweden for arranging a most magnificient and memorable visit for Julie, Dave and myself! We’re most grateful. Thank you also for the music, and the Kalashnikov vodka.

Tuesday evening, Moscow was our next stop. Engineering, Support, Internal IT, Professional Services — as in Sweden, various MySQL departments were represented. Russia is a key personnel country for MySQL, and has been so for years. It’s my third time with MySQL in Moscow, and it feels good to start being able to find Count Dolgorukyi, Arbat, St. Basil’s Cathedral, Kremlin, the Red Square, and the Tverskaya Ulitsa.

So as not to bore you with repeating the MySQL on-boarding discussions we had, which were much the same as everywhere else, let me instead share our experience of how to login into Russia, and, more complicated, Marriott Grand Hotel on Tverskaya.

Scene 1: Yesterday, 15:00, Domodedovo airport, Rusaero Biznes Terminal.

• Immigration lady: Do you need an immigration card?
• We: Uhmm, if you say so
• No further action, we depart from Domodedovo, which depending on traffic is between 60 and 120 minutes from the city

Scene 2: Yesterday, 16:30, Marriott Grand Hotel, Tverskaya.

• Marriott check-in gentleman: Can I please have your immigration card?
• We: Ehmm, we didn’t get any!
• Marriott guy: Surely you got one, at immigration, otherwise you wouldn’t have got into the country!
• We: Really, we didn’t.
• Marriott guy: So then I cannot register you into the hotel. It’s the law.
• We: OK, so what should we do?
• Marriott guy: Go back to Domodedovo and get it!
• We: But we’re here only for tonight, it’s five already, we have meetings!
• Marriott guy: It’s the law. We cannot register you.
• Our local MySQLer (let’s call him Misha Bulgakov) shows up: Hi! What’s up?
• … explanations … repeated firm statements from both parties … time passes … some of us get slightly nervous … shall we sleep on Misha’s floor? … more time passes
• Misha, in Russian, to the Marriott guy: What if I book the rooms?
• Marriott guy: Uh, I suppose that would work.
• … investigations …
• Marriott Transport Desk: How can I help you?
• Me: Can I book a taxi for tomorrow from here to Domodedovo Airport, tomorrow morning, room 1234, last name Arnö?
• Marriott Transport Desk: Sure! But, what was the last name again?
• Me: Uhmm … Bulgakov!
• Marriott Transport Desk: Right! No problem.

So, after Misha signing here and there, the Bulgakov party can continue and meet with the MySQLers at “our” office nearby, have excellent sushi at a Japanese restaurant, and take a walk to the Red Square.

Scene 3: Today, 8:30, Domodedovo airport, Rusaero Biznes Terminal.

• Immigration lady: Privet!
• We: Hey, you forgot to give us an immigration card yesterday. We couldn’t check in to Marriott without it. We were in big trouble!
• Immigration lady: Oh, what a pity.
• We: It was slightly more than just a pity.

On we go. Izhevsk, here we come!

After Dublin, our next stop on the World Tour was Sweden. While several MySQLers were out on travel (in Dublin, amongst other places!) related to the Sun-MySQL integration, we had the opportunity to meet with Swedish MySQL employees from various parts of the organisation, including Sales, Engineering, Support, and Internal IT.

Yesterday’s dinner at Domtrappkällaren was a memorable one, with an opportunity to share war stories and anecdotes with our Sun colleagues Dave Douglas and Julie Ross. They got their fair share of tales from past MySQL Developer Meetings (ah, Prague! ohh, Sorrento!) and Staff Meetings (you wouldn’t believe what happened to this new guy in Sales on his first day, when arriving at his hotel room in Cancùn).

Equally important, we took time to look at what will happen next. Swedes will in short order be on-boarded, which involves everything form signing papers to getting their first salary from Sun, as opposed to MySQL AB.

Some groups of MySQLers will over time change their duties, and I encouraged those whose tasks are most likely to change or whose organisations will somehow be moved, to make themselves visible for the parts of MySQL that they might belong to when 2008 has ended.

“If you’d like to get out of the aircraft quickly, and we’re not around to help you, grab this red handle on the door and pull it up.” Our friendly pilot (from what I later dubbed Decadence Airlines) just gave us his friendly security instructions at take-off from Dublin airport, on the way to Bromma in Stockholm. Dave Douglas, Julie Ross and myself are heading on the first leg of our trip to meet MySQL personnel across Europe.

I’ve been frequently teased about using “Sun’s Corporate Jet”. Flying around on that one is certainly perceived as glamorous, and perhaps not compatible with the humble roots of MySQL. Well, glamorous or not, here we are, three people, three empty seats and two pilots up in the sky. However, it’s not exactly “Sun’s” jet. It’s Netjets, more like a taxi than a company car. We’re going to have a different pilot tomorrow, and a different plane. That said, I do enjoy it and I took my favourite gadget, my 8mm fisheye lens, with me to commemorate the moment.

The purpose of the trip is quite a bit closer to the humble roots of MySQL, though. As opposed to asking everyone to come to one place to listen to centrally dispersed top-down communication, our ambition is to go where the MySQLers are, and listen to what their questions, concerns and joys are. The on-boarding process is just getting underway, and we were addressing questions related to terms and conditions of employment, how territories change, or how to interface with the Sun Visors (the existing Sun employees who can give all the inside tips on whom at Sun to get introduced to, which intranet URLs to visit, and which mailing lists to subscribe to).

And, as before, Sun’s attitude is respectful, positive, helpful. It’s about “we’ll make it work”, without at the same time extending promises that cannot be held later on.

So, now on from the Inside Sales teams of Dublin to the very heterogeneous group of MySQLers from the mother county of Sweden!

Are you close to Munich? Are you available next Friday afternoon? Would you like to meet some MySQLers? And some Sun employees, whom we hope to lure from Sun’s German headquarters in Heimstetten?

Then, come to the Hilton where many of the Bundesliga football clubs stay when playing against FC Bayern München: Munich Hilton am Tucherpark, close to Englischer Garten.

I suggest you to be there at about 14:30. We theoretically start at 14, but two Sun execs and I are arriving late from Hamburg that same afternoon. We expect to be there by 14:45.

What will we discuss?

Well, the setup is the same as for many other meetups, between MySQLers, customers, community, and Sun employees. We’ll tell you that we’re continuing our support of all popular operating systems, and all popular development environments — just like we’ve stressed elsewhere. We’ll share our thinking on what will change and what will stay the same, and on why Sun’s acquisition made sense for MySQL, for Sun, and — most importantly — for community. Most of all, though, we plan on discussing with you, answering your questions, and learning from your experiences in working with MySQL (the product, the company, the community).

You can drop by unannounced. However, we’d like to know how much drinks and snacks to ask Hilton to prepare. And that’s why I’d like you to email Jean-Jérôme Schmidt (jjschmidt at mysql.com) and tell him you think you’ll attend. This is especially if you’re from MySQL or from Sun. Remember, we hope to lure many Sun employees to quit early on Friday afternoon and attend the meetup with MySQL community members and MySQL GmbH employees!

The World Tour starts on IRC next week!

The schedule is as follows:

• Wed 5 March 2008: Ian Murdock, 7am PT/16 CET. Ian is the ian of Debian and Chief OS Platform Strategist at Sun Microsystems. Wikipedia puts it like this:
  

  Since joining Sun, he has led Project Indiana, which he describes as “taking the lesson that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris,” making a full OpenSolaris distribution with GNOME and userland tools from GNU plus a network-based package management system.

• Thu 6 March 2008: Simon Phipps 6am PT/15CET. Simon is Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems. Sun’s Executive Bio says:
  

  [Simon is] co-ordinating Sun’s extensive participation in free and open source software communities, promoting consistency and best practice and actively participating in the global conversation they express. Prior to this appointment he co-founded Sun’s pioneering staff weblog facility at blogs.sun.com. Simon joined Sun in mid-2000.

• UPDATED: Wed 12 March 2008: Bob Brewin 9am PT / 18 CET. Bob is a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technology Officer for Software at Sun Microsystems. Sun’s Executive Bio says:
  

  His responsibilities include technical leadership for developer products and application platforms, including the Java platform, mobility, enterprise software and business integration products. Within this role, some of his key areas of responsibility include Sun’s expanding role in the development of Web 2.0 technologies, improving the developer experience, and alignment and integration of our platforms, technologies and tools.

I’ll also be there, and so will several other MySQLers.

The purpose is for us to come to where the MySQL users are, online, for an informal chat. We’ll try our best to answer your questions!

Instructions:

1. Start your favourite IRC client. In my case, that’s X-Chat on my Mac.
2. Connect to the irc.freenode.net server.
3. /join #mysql. That’s the channel we’ll be in. At least I will also be on #mysql-dev (for those who hack on MySQL Server itself, as opposed to use MySQL in their own apps) and #mysql.de (in German).

Chat to you on Wednesday and Thursday!

I hope I’ll have the opportunity to meet you in person soon.

A face to face meeting may indeed be possible, if our World Tour celebrating the acquisition of MySQL by Sun has a stop close to you, and if I happen to be lucky to be attending that particular meetup just announced:

To toast the success of the acquisition and engage with customers, employees, community developers and partners, Sun and MySQL executives will kick-off a global tour in March, hitting major cities worldwide leading up to the popular MySQL Conference & Expo in April. Every Sun-MySQL community can participate online, including videos, photos and comments from each stop at www.sun.com/mysqltour. This site will invite the public to visit the tour in a nearby city to meet Sun-MySQL executives, local developers and other open source enthusiasts.

If you click at the Google map, you’ll see our schedule.

The trip takes us to interesting places. For me, there’s a first: Izhevsk, the capital city of the Udmurt Republic in Russia (start in Moscow, fly straight towards the Ural mountains, stop at 2/3 of the distance). That’s where MySQL has one of its longest-serving and most prominent development teams, and I’m ashamed I haven’t dropped by before — but happy to be able to fix it in March.

And if you’re a MySQLer or MySQL meetup organiser, do contact Sun about hosting an event close to you. Email MeetUpTour@Sun.COM and contact your local MySQL Community Team member: Jay Pipes for North America, Lenz Grimmer for EMEA, Colin Charles for APAC, and worldwide Community Team Lead Giuseppe Maxia — who all are best approached through firstname@mysql.com.

The tour talks about us as “rock stars”. Now where’s humble old MySQL? Well, perhaps you never regarded MySQL as humble, but I’ll tell you two anecdotes on the topic anyway.

First, yes, I’d like to think we’re humble. But at the same time, we’re sticking out our heads in various circumstances. From my former-and-current boss, ex-MySQL-CEO now-Sun-SVP Mårten Mickos, I’ve with pride stolen the expression “We’re world famous for being humble“. It tries to capture that we don’t claim MySQL is good for all purposes (”we’re the best for everything”), but we still don’t hide that MySQL is being used by some fairly impressive enterprises.

Second, I’ll tell you about a humbling experience from right after I joined MySQL in 2001. Our founder, Michael “Monty” Widenius wanted me to be exposed to the external community of MySQL users. So he asked me to go to Belgrade in Serbia, to present for the Open Source Network of Yugoslavia. The room could fit 200 people. About 250 turned up. I was the only foreign speaker, and I had asked for some tips by MySQL’s first non-founder employee, Sinisa Milivojevic (incidentally a Serb). So I opened with “Dobar dan svima!”, good day to you all. Applause! Wow! Then I continued with a phrase that I’ve forgotten by now, but it meant “sorry for not speaking Serbian”. Further applause! “Why? It’s just me, Kaj!”, I was thinking. But I was truly being treated as a rock star. Talking to the hosts after the presentation, I understood that my favourable reception was partly due to a Western foreigner finally visiting Serbia without dropping bombs in their necks, and even apologising for not speaking Serbian.

Unfortunately, Belgrade isn’t on my track this time, but at least Dublin, Stockholm, Moscow, Izhevsk, Kiev, Hamburg, Munich and Milano are. And this time, I promise to do more than just the greeting sentences in a predominant local non-English language (huh, except for Gaelic in Dublin). Let’s see if I succeed.

For a split second, I thought Jonathan said he thought of Sun’s acquisition of MySQL as “hypocritical”. Of course, what he said was “Hippocratical”, in the sense of the old Greek with the oath for doctors: “Do no harm.”

Jonathan appeared in front of the integration team with MySQL and Sun employees here in Menlo Park. What he said was very comfortable to hear for MySQLers old and new:

• Jonathan sees a great strategic fit between MySQL and Sun, and that’s the prime precondition for any good acquisition.
• The strategic fit thinking is seconded by financial analysts and technical observers alike.
• “Honour the community“: Jonathan sees the community of MySQL users as the starting point for all decisions related to the integration.
• “Honour the employees“: Jonathan respects the group of MySQL employees who has taken MySQL to where it is today.
• “No cost synergy“: The deal was not struck to take cost out, but to enable new opportunities for both deep technical innovation all the way to the microelectronics level, and business deals with MySQL users not yet turned into customers.

Jonathan is absolutely very familiar with MySQL, and he wants us to win. I have a hard time imagining how anybody but Jonathan could better combine being humble and down-to-earth with an attitude for winning. If I had merely read his concluding statement, I wouldn’t have been nearly as thrilled as I am having experienced it:

“I don’t want to be shy about winning. If you don’t win with a smile on your face, why bother?“

Monday, I’m off to the Sun-MySQL Integration Offsite in Menlo Park. That’s where we’re going to plan the next steps of making MySQL a part of Sun. It’s a three-day offsite, from Tuesday to Thursday, and I’m looking forward to meeting with many new colleagues.

Integrating companies is never easy, and I don’t expect this integration to be trivial, either. But thinking about the many cultural similarities between MySQL and Sun, about our mutual commitment to Open Source, about the positive reception of the acquisition by MySQL employees, and about the positive reception also from the side of Sun, I think we’re in for a great ride and some exciting times, in the best sense of the words.

Sun, here we come!

I spent a couple of hours on Friday at Sun’s office in Finland. It was a visit full of mutual anticipation.

Until the deal is closed, Sun and MySQL are merely planning joint activities, with execution happening once the deal is closed. Already now, lots of touching points were revealed in the informal discussions with Margot Wik, Thomas Branders and their colleagues. It seems both Sun and MySQL have a hard time not going into detail, but such are the rules of the game.

Before Sun Finland’s Friday afternoon coffee, Margot, Thomas and I picked the opportunity to drop by at Teknologföreningen, the Swedish language student corporation at Helsinki University of Technology. That’s the place where I learned to know Margot and Thomas, as well as our CEO Mårten, and many others. And where I “learned” how to sing Helan går. Some things hadn’t changed much since the early 1980s. Oh, perhaps our age. Margot was looking out for classmates from school, not of her own, but of her eldest son.

The afternoon coffee drew what I understood to be a large crowd. Sun Finland has about 130 employees, and I counted over 60 coffee and tea drinkers. With Finland being the country where most of MySQL’s original code was written, I spent some time explaining the early days of MySQL, both pre-1995 (when MySQL was first released) and pre-2001 (when VC funding started the commercial growth of MySQL). We then quickly moved on to more current issues, and my impression was that the Sun guys in Finland have a hard time waiting for the action to start.

I could imagine less fortunate stars, under which to start an integration process!