A particular blog entry usually feels relevant and topical when fresh, at least to the author. So let’s say a blog entry even carries some non-zero long-term value. How do you find it after a while? And more importantly, how will your readers find your blog entry?

Descriptive subjects go a long way. But your readers may be searching for “development model” when your header says “release plan”. And even if you anticipate the search words used by your readers, you can only pick one wording for your header.

Full-text search also helps. There’s now a brand new Search field in the top left corner of Planet MySQL. Chances are you’ll find what you look for, no matter if search for “Chinese”, “DRBD”, “development” or “PHP”. You may even search for several words, such as “Chinese, UTF”.

Easy searchability calls for yet a bit more, namely tagging. Tags are a great way for the author (or for the reader!) to underline key aspects of a blog post (or Flickr picture or Slideshare presentation or any item you post on the Web, of course).

And next to searching, tagging is the second area where PlanetMySQL has lately been improved, by Dups, as announced in his blog entry last week.

Four key points:

1. Tags are displayed under the blog header. We import the tags originally written by the blogger.
2. When you click on the tags, you’ll find blog posts with that tag across individual blogs. Example: http://planet.mysql.com/?tag_search=169 has all PHP tagged posts, on any blog aggregated to Planet MySQL.
3. You can also search for (multiple) tags in the search field. Example: “Tag: PHP, development”.
4. The community may edit tags (when logged in to MySQL.com). The wisdom of individual community members can thus be shared by others.

For more, go read Dups’s blog!

P.S. UPDATE: I got a question on what the numbers in the picture are. They’re “numeric tags” in the Firefox browser, as appearing with the “Mouseless Browsing” add-on. They enable me to “click” on links from the keyboard without moving my hand to the mouse.

Travelling to Hongkong and Taipei has made such an impression on me, that I couldn’t help but add two new blogs to my homepage kaj.arno.fi:

• http://blogs.arno.fi/guanxi/ is (or pretends to be) in Simplified Chinese, written on the Chinese mainland
• http://blogs.arno.fi/yilingyi/ is (or pretends to be) in Traditional Chinese, written here in Taiwan

Guanxi means “relations”, as in “Community Relations”. It’s also a very common word describing how to get things done in China. It even has its own English language Wikipedia entry.

Yi-ling-yi means one-oh-one, as in Taipei 101. This number sequence also means “special” in Chinese. Taipei 101 is the world’s highest completed skyscraper. Needless to say, that merits another Wikipedia entry, not to mention a blog entry in Traditional Chinese.

Tomorrow, I’ll make another attempt at giving a short MySQL speech in Mandarin. Well, technically speaking, it’s already today, as it’s 3:30am in Taipei. My internal clock has gone awry.

Time for a dump of some lessons learnt from my blog posting “On Open Source and Open Competition in a not-so-Open World“.

Let me start by a recap of what the process looked from my point of view:

1. My close colleague gets his visa rejected. He is a seasoned Australia visitor, so I assumed (and still assume) he knew what he was doing.
2. We connect the dots between the rejection and an IM discussion from August 2008 (see comment #29 on my blog), related to competition and Sun employees being let into Australia. Due to the nature of how visa rejections work, I cannot prove this is the case (even with the additional information I have by now), but my current best guess is still that the rejection happened in the aftermath of the discussion in comment #29.
3. I blogged my frustration, sticking to the facts, except that I didn’t make it clear that the ground for rejection (competitiveness) was not given by the Australian immigration authorities, but inferred by ourselves observing the pattern (= no rejections prior to the competitiveness chat).
4. Comments of support start flowing in. Full of sympathy, most people are puzzled by the rejection. Some infer a conspiracy related to an Australian anti-open-source agenda. I am taken by surprise by the level of interest.
5. Interest by journalists start appearing, in Australia and overseas. Soon, I am no longer surprised.
6. I add clarifications. More details to the facts. And I add the exact reason for why I referred to competitiveness (comment #29).
7. I get plenty of email support from within Sun. “How can we help?” Three direct reports of our CEO Jonathan Schwartz are in email contact with me.
8. I get a comment from the Australian immigration authorities (Sandi Logan, NatComms Mngr, Immigration, Canberra, comment #45). She clarifies how the rejectee should approach the embassy upon rejection, and goes into what the usual rejection reasons are.
9. The person whose visa was rejected goes to his Australian embassy. While he still doesn’t get a reason for why his visa was rejected in the first place, he is cleared and won’t experience issues the next time.

I can tell you I most definitely didn’t expect to get nearly 50 comments on this blog entry, nor to end up on Heise and The Register, nor to be contacted by several members of Sun’s Executive Leadership Team. So I learned a couple of lessons from this blog entry:

1. The Internet loves a scandal. If there is a distinct smell of injustice, people will show both interest and support.
2. Australians are friendly. I knew that already, but getting a comment from the immigration authorities on my blog, that was a lot more than I had expected.
3. Blog phrasing sometimes has to be very fine tuned. Had I known the amount of attention the blog post would get, I would have been explicit from the beginning about competition being an inferred reason that I cannot objectively prove.
4. The supportive reaction within Sun Microsystems gave me, and above all the guy whose visa was rejected,  an extremely warm family feeling, resembling that of a much, much smaller company. This even more remarkable given that Sun is in the middle of a painful reduction in force.

Hence, a big Thank You is due (in no particular order)

• to all the commenters from Australia and elsewhere
• to the journalists (in Australia and overseas)
• to Sandi Logan and the Australian immigration authorities
• to the Sun Microsystems Executive Leadership Team
  

for your sympathy, support and personal attention!

Yesterday, I started my sporadic series of blog posts where I share my experiences improving my online manners through social networking websites, many of which are powered by MySQL. My first target was the traveller site Dopplr, and this time, it’s Google’s picture sharing site Picasa Web.

My starting point is the same: “Everyone else” among colleagues and friends was there long before me, and I feel like a latecomer. I want to go in, do what seems to be the right thing, and share the observations I had. And everything within the time constraint of not being able to do a full evaluation, as I obviously have other things to do as well.

Unlike Dopplr, starting with Picasa Web never required invitations. My first exposure to Picasa was through MySQL colleague Zack Urlocker’s biking trips. He shared albums of his trips, which I browsed through, and found “quite OK”. Meaning: Easy to consume pics posted by others, but no trigger for me to start producing web albums myself. When running with Zack, the Picasa topic occasionally popped up, with me expressing skepticism towards the time expenditure for uploading a gallery, and Zack saying it wasn’t that hard, as there is a good picture uploader. It turns out Zack was right, as I learned much later.

What triggered me to join Picasa Web was my blogging. A blog entry without a single picture isn’t very appealing, and some blog entries require many pictures. I had for long used a complex setup, uploading my pictures using Unix utility scp from my Mac to my account on @arno.fi. The domain arno.fi was a parallel domain to a now-extinct server grankulla.mysql.com, which I had to stop using after the Sun acquisition, as the use was bordering on the private. So I started to host arno.fi privately (a different story entirely) and became worried about bandwidth cost for the pics referred to from blogs.mysql.com/kaj. So the MySQL Web Team enabled uploading of pictures as part of the MySQL Wordpress blog site itself. This worked fine, but by this time I had already thought a bit about hosting the pics on Picasa or Flickr. So when I saw Picasa pictures automatically connected to Google profiles and Google maps, I decided to try out Picasa.

Like for all social networking sites, I obviously had to register. This wasn’t hard, and it was part of my general Google profile (Google Reader, Google Mail etc.). The real obstacle which had kept me from doing it earlier was installing the picture uploader, called “Picasa Web Albums Uploader“. I’m not a person who likes to tweak with the technical setup of my computers, hence the reluctance. But it was OK. I didn’t have to know anything in advance; the Picasa web site gave the relevant pointers and I wasn’t lead astray during the installation.

Next came the learning part, which in fact turned out to be fun. Uploading the pictures was trivial. I am a character based (”command line”) type of guy, hence the perceived ease-of-use of the scp utility. But merely dragging the pictures from the Mac Finder to the Picasa Uploader was easier still. And uploading pics with the Picasa Uploader came with two real benefits:

1. Automatic picture resizing into multiple sizes: 144px, 288px, 400px, 800px. For that I had used the resize command of Imagemagick, which took me quite a while to install, and which despite its command line nature wasn’t as fast and automagick as the ease of use of the Picasa Uploader for this specific task. Plus, Picasa relieves me of renaming pics in various resolutions to distinguish them from each other.
2. Easy housekeeping of album names / directories. I like order (not that I always succeed in keeping it). So I dislike putting all pics into a one single directory. The Picasa uploader provides me with a drop-down list of my previously used albums ( “directories”), which I can refill, or the opportunity to create a new album (”directory”). And at the point of upload, I can very quickly label the pics.

The next step is completely optional, but very “cool” and inspiring: I can tag the pictures, and I can place them on Google Maps.

Tagging is merely about finding out multiple, good descriptions for pictures, for later searches. So that doesn’t take long.

Placing the picture on the map can be everything from dead easy to very frustrating. For my pictures from Munich, I very simply typed in the address: just “Balanstr. 22″ for the pictures of my son trying to be an actor, and “Kleinfeldstr. 28b, Germering” for the pictures of my daughter by Riccardo Desiderio. For South Africa, it was much harder. It didn’t know Kievits Kroon, Reier road, or even Kameeldrift. I just had to point manually to somewhere north-east of Pretoria, where I assumed the pics were taken. That was a time drain.

Still, as a result, I got a nice map of where I took the pics of the trip, and if I’d like more detail, I’ll even see the individual pictures placed on a map.

The last step is about using the Picasa pictures in the blog itself. And this is also a bit simplified from my character-based scp blogging, where I had to semi-manually concatenate the first part of the picture urls (”http://kaj.arno.fi/”) with the name of the picture (”IMG_1234_Blabla.JPG”). In Picasa, I do the opposite, i.e. I cut-and-paste the huge text provided by Picasa, e.g.

<table style=”width:auto;”><tr><td><a href=”http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/YpJLrGsLVDIbs_jSHkAQ-Q”><img src=”http://lh5.ggpht.com/_6eAQKKvv8LA/SQwrd02hu3I/AAAAAAAAAXw/xvphDvabhsQ/s288/Kaj_RD_Kvadrat_B_7729.jpg” /></a></td></tr><tr><td style=”font-family:arial,sans-serif; font-size:11px; text-align:right”>Från <a href=”http://picasaweb.google.com/kaj.arno.2/KajArnPortraits”>Kaj Arnö Portraits</a></td></tr></table>

and clean it up from surplus stuff to get only what I want, i.e.

<img src=”http://lh5.ggpht.com/_6eAQKKvv8LA/SQwrd02hu3I/AAAAAAAAAXw/xvphDvabhsQ/s288/Kaj_RD_Kvadrat_B_7729.jpg”/>

which I then paste into my Wordpress blog entry, perhaps adding an align=”right” or align=”left” in the process. And I take care to select the desired resolution: 144px, 288px, 400px or 800px; more than once, I’ve been happy with reducing the picture size further than what I would have done during my Imagemagick resize days.

In all of this, I see little if any problem, except the huge size of the licensing agreement I clicked through. That’s another barrier of entry. I don’t know what I really agreed to. Who knows, perhaps I even violated the agreement by taking screen shots of what Picasa looks like, for this blog entry?

Which brings me to my summary:

	Positive experiences: Many, and significant   + Very easy and fast to upload pictures + No need to shrink the pictures before upload — Picasa does it for you + Great to get many resolutions (144px, 288px, 400px, 800px) automatically + Fast integration of pictures in blog entries + Easy to keep pictures in order + Cool to tag the pictures for searches + Cool to place pictures on maps
	Negative experiences: Few, and all related to legalese   - Very irritating to have such a lengthy license agreement - The license agreement was so long and difficult that I don’t know what I agreed to - Meaning, I also don’t know if I’m missing something important - And why didn’t I get http://picasaweb.google.com/kajarno as my public page?
	My own confusion — no fault of the social network itself  Privacy! It isn’t even 20 % clear to me when it’s in my interest to allow the albums to be visible for everyone, and when it should be private (sure, I won’t put up pictures of drunken friends, or of myself in a similar state — but what about the innocent family pictures I linked above?) I first thought Picasa was a standalone photo organiser like iPhoto, and then learned it was a picture sharing thingie like Flickr, but only now reading Wikipedia do I understand I was right to begin with, and Picasa Web is separate from Picasa (good thing I read that before posting this blog entry, as I now sprinkled in the word “Web” here and there after “Picasa”)
	Remaining questions from my side   How much time should I spend uploading my existing pictures? Should I do that at least for my past blog pictures? Privacy! When should I make my pictures public? Why? Should I link the pictures from other social networking sites? How can I do that easily? Privacy again! Who will use the tags I provide Picasa Web with? Will that be of benefit or harm to me?

Starting to use Picasa Web Albums has so far been a very positive experience, and I do expect to manage all my online pictures in it, and get lots of good vibes from it going forward.

Links:

• Picasa Web Albums: http://picasaweb.google.com
• My Picasa Web page: http://picasaweb.google.com/kaj.arno.2/
• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa#Picasa_Web_Albums

To understand a bit of Italian, I just need a comparatively small amount of vino bianco. By contrast, to get any information flow going at all in Russian requires larger amounts of … preparation. That doesn’t have to be vodka, it can also be interesting discussions with Russians, or the opportunity to give a speech.

Now, a blog is the scalable way to interact with the rest of humanity, and I’m trying to increase my fluency in all things Web 2.0. So, here goes, may I present my Russian blog:

Like in the case of presenting my Italian blog, let me quote Google Translate’s automatic translation of some of my “writings” — deliberately doing so without making any improvements on the automatic translation:

Why this blog?

When I learned to read when I was five years old, I decided to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. This is not a normal thing to do in Finland at the time, but how was I supposed to know? A television program called “Good evening, ‘and learn to read Russian, appears to be a smart career move for a five-year-old boy.

And I learned Russian alphabet. Nevertheless, I did not learn the Russian language.

Although I grew up in a neighboring country, the Soviet Union, it took until 1985 before I first went there. I went with two friends, and we stayed at the Hotel Europe. Incidentally, in Finland, Archbishop John Vikström was there at the same time.

Now it’s time for me to learn Russian. In addition, I visit Russia more than once a year, so I decided to start a blog in Russian.

The purpose of my blog is to

• learn more Russian
• to learn more about Russia
• be inspired to visit Russia more

I go to Russia for work and for pleasure, and I use blogs for both purposes.

Why not write a blog in Russian?

The fact that I do not speak English is not an excuse, not a blog in Russian.

I want to prove the point: these days, it is possible to create a blog in Russian, even if you do not speak Russian, but only pretends to do so.

I have occasionally tried to pick up a little Russian language for many years, but what makes this blog Google Translate. Usually, I write in Swedish, but unfortunately the Russian language has a high quality, starting with English. That is why I first write something in English. Next, I ask Google to translate my text in Russian. I look at the translation and make the first guess as to whether it is perhaps understandable. Finally, I ask Google to translate it back from Russian to English. If I can understand it, I finally publish my text.

Let’s see where this experiment takes me!

Tags: gladness, friendship, contacts, Russian, Respect, language

Fandorin: Naming issues

How to choose the name “blogs.arno.fi / fandorin /” to my blog?

Well, “blogs” should be easy and self explanatory.

And “arno” should also be fairly easy to understand: That’s because my name Arnö, and people used 7-bit domain names (why I bought arno.fi but not arnö.fi).

“. Fi” part, of course, must be self-evident: I am from Finland. I grew up in Finland. I have always lived in Finland, except for 2002-04 (in Munich) and 2006 - the year (in Munich). Summary: I am a Finnish citizen, as all my ancestors over many generations [1].

“/ Fandorin” part deserves more explanation. I chose it because my closeness to Russian literature, particularly for my favorite characters Erast Petrovich Fandorin books Boris Akunin. I think I have read all of them (unfortunately, not in Russian, but also in German).

Alternative names for your blog could be “yevski”, as I always joked that I wanted someone to write an operating system with the same name. Why? Because I could write a utility for converting files yevsky (and move them into DOS). The title of this utility will dostoyevski. However, as DOS virtually obsolete, I have concluded that there would be no market for these products.

[1] my father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father, Jakob Saktmodig of Dragsfjärd in Finland, was in line with the church books (1712) “rysk afföda”, which I always interpreted as a “lower-quality Russian origin” (but handwriting in the book was bad)

Tags: Fandorin, Boris Akunin, Dostoevsky, Fandorin, Finland, Erast Petrovich Fandorin

Providing a presentation in Russian

Yesterday and today I had the opportunity to make a presentation in Russian. Colleagues of MySQL and Sun have helped me to translate from English to Russian what I wanted to say.

The presentation takes about six minutes to deliver, and I was very happy to get a lot of questions afterwards.

As I clearly do not speak Russian, it seems to be strange, the idea of simply reading aloud from the paper for six minutes. Let me explain why I think it was a good idea, but first let me paste the contents of my speech:

Dear users of MySQL, dear Sun customers and students of St. Petersburg University, Ladies and Gentlemen! Good evening! I am pleased to welcome you today at this meeting where we gather to celebrate and discuss the company’s acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems. I hope this meeting will give a better idea of what benefit each of you can draw from combining our companies. [...]

Now you may ask yourself: Why am I talking in English, when it is obvious that I can hardly even understand what I am talking about?

I tried to explain why I do it in my blog entry in blogs.mysql.com / kaj /. Here are some central parts of it:

“Why” and “How to” make the presentation more local than this can be done in English

English as a language of communication greatly exaggerated. In the international context, English may be sufficient for the transfer of meaning, but it has serious drawbacks when it comes to creating social ties, showing respect, to build confidence and having fun.

In general, there is nothing wrong in English. This is a good language, just as many others. But just as in biology, monoculture causes many risks, and diversity is good. Let’s celebrate it, let’s enjoy it, and let us reap commercial benefits from it!

Tags: MySQL, Sun Microsystems, use, acquisition, Respect, Language

To my surprise, I got comments on my Russian blog even before announcing it. Thank you, karidola! You seem to share my interest in the Finland Swedish author Tove Jansson (she’s the one with the Moomins that I found in Japan) and in the Icelandic language

For those of you who, unlike me, can read Russian faster than a five-year-old, I suggest you to take a look at these pages that I pretended to write, and for which I used no other help than what can be obtained through Wikipedia and Google Translate (specifically, I used no human / Russian help):

• Почему именно этот блог? http://blogs.arno.fi/fandorin/why-this-blog/
• Почему бы не писать блог на русском языке? http://blogs.arno.fi/fandorin/2008/10/25/why-not-write-a-blog-in-russian/
• Предоставление презентации на русском языке http://blogs.arno.fi/fandorin/2008/06/17/delivering-a-presentation-in-russian/
• Fandorin: именования вопросы http://blogs.arno.fi/fandorin/2008/10/25/fandorin-name/

As with the Italian blog, what I really am curious to know is, what my Russian speaking friends and colleagues will say. Anjuta? Sergei? Kostja (who looks like Fandorin on the book cover)? And Dima, Alik, Igor, Bar, Holyfoot, Gluh, Ramil, Vladislav, Kaamos, Sveta, Vita, Evgeniy, Sanja, Valerii, Timour, Lawrin, Peter, Arseniy, Kitry, Natalia, Natasha, Grisha, Elena, Dmitry, Ekaterina, Olga, Vladimir, Egor, (and I’m sure I’ve embarrassingly omitted several friends — please forgive me), and last but definitely not least, Морж!

Given that I don’t speak Italian, it may seem a bit strange that I just started an Italian language blog on http://blogs.arno.fi/dolce_vita/:

But I do have a point with my blog. Let me quote Google Translate’s automatic translation of some of my “writings” — deliberately doing so without making any improvements on the automatic translation:

Why this blog?

“Of all the languages that I do not speak, I speak Italian the best.”

This is my motto when it comes to speaking Italian. Moreover, Italy is my favorite country to visit for pleasure, so I decided to start a blog in Italian.

The purpose of my blog is

• Learn more Italian
• to learn more about Italy
• inspired to visit Italy more often

I go to Italy for both work and pleasure, and I use the blog for both purposes.

Why not write a blog in Italian?

The fact that I do not speak Italian is no longer an excuse, not to have a blog in Italian.

I want to prove a point: these days, it is perfectly possible to create a blog in Italian only by pretending to speak Italian.

I like to say “Of all the languages that I do not speak, I speak Italian the best, but what enables this blog is Google Translate. I normally write in Swedish, but unfortunately, the translation has a higher quality if you start from English. This is why I initially write something in English. So, I ask Google to translate my text into Italian. I read the translation and make a first proofreading if it might be understandable. Finally, I ask Google to translate again from Italian to English. If I can still understand, I finally publish my text.

Let’s see where this experiment takes me!

I spoke Italian to 4 minutes 12 seconds!

Today I delivered a speech in Italian. Many thanks to Giuseppe Maxia, who translated my speech yesterday by the French. I pasted here:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this informal meeting to celebrate and discuss the acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems.

My name is Kaj Arno, and the Vice President for the Community of MySQL. I come from Monaco, but not the Bavarian. Finnish are as Monty, the creator of MySQL, and many others.
During the integration with Sun, I also the role of Ambassador of MySQL, that I visit all the offices and explain what Sun MySQL. [...]

Now, you may ask yourself: Why speak Italian, when it is clear that I can not speak it?

I tried to explain why I do my blog in English. Some central parts of it:

The “Why” and “How” to do more local presentations of what can be done in English

The English as a language of communication is highly overrated. In an international context, English may be sufficient to transmit meaning, but has serious shortcomings when it comes to establishing a social relationship, showing respect, to create a climate of trust, and to have fun.

All in all, there’s nothing wrong with English. It is a good language, like many others. But just as in biology, monoculture comes with many risks, and diversity is good. Let us celebrate, let us enjoy, and we try to derive commercial benefits out of it!

“Egosurfing” in Italy

The term “egosurfing” is used to describe the act of entering his name into a search engine site to assess its presence and relevance on the Internet. It can be seen as selfish, or at least vain. However, they are not free of those sins.

I decided to do some “egosurfing” specific to Italy, adding “site:. It” for the research: “Kaj Arno” site:. It. To my surprise, I found 135 items!

Here are some results: [...]

For those of you who, like me, sometimes pretend to read Italian, I suggest you to take a look at these pages that I pretended to write, and for which I used no other help than what can be obtained through Wikipedia and Google Translate (specifically, I used no human / Italian help):

• Perché questo blog? http://blogs.arno.fi/dolce_vita/perche-questo-blog/
• Perché “Dolce vita?” http://blogs.arno.fi/dolce_vita/2008/10/25/perche-dolce-vita/
• Perché non scrivere un blog in italiano? http://blogs.arno.fi/dolce_vita/2008/10/25/perche-non-scrivere-un-blog-in-italiano/
• “Egosurfing” in Italia: http://blogs.arno.fi/dolce_vita/2008/10/25/egosurfing-in-italia/
• Ho parlato italiano per 4 minuti 12 secondi! http://blogs.arno.fi/dolce_vita/2008/04/03/ho-parlato-italiano-per-4-minuti-12-secondi/

What I want to say at this point is: Thank you, Google Translate!

And what I really wonder is, what will Giuseppe say? And Ivan Zoratti? And Maurizio Gianola? And Massimo, Emanuela, Raffaella, Luca, Franco, Ettore, and all my other Italian friends and colleagues?

I just started a new blog on photography, in German. It’s based in http://blogs.arno.fi/foto/ and so far only has just four entries — one on a photo session with fashion photographer Riccardo Desiderio, one on my ensuing autumn portraits of my wife along the Isar here in Munich, one on fun underwater photography (autotranslated to English) and another about a Panama hat (also autotranslated).

Judging from the quality of the auto translations, this is going to be only for German readers. So far, I’ve mostly stated

• Why this blog? http://blogs.arno.fi/foto/wieso-dieser-blog/
• Why photography? http://blogs.arno.fi/foto/wieso-fotografieren/
• My photographic biography: http://blogs.arno.fi/foto/fotografischer-lebenslauf/
• Challenges: http://blogs.arno.fi/foto/herausforderungen/

Perhaps this new blog may mean I won’t disturb PlanetMySQL.org with endless posts on mountaineering and running any longer, where one mentioning of the word “MySQL” triggers the aggregation of a huge entry.

“So, I suppose MySQL’s main competitor is Oracle?” is a frequent question I get asked by the press. “Well, we don’t really compete heads-on with other databases. We co-exist! Just as an example: Over a third of respondents in an Oracle User Group survey said they also use MySQL”, I answer.

The reporter then continues “But everyone has a main competitor. Don’t you plan for people to migrate from Oracle to MySQL?”. I continue with “Not really. Migrations do happen, but not all that often. MySQL tends to be used in new applications.”

“But surely you must have some competitive atmosphere, or equivalent feelings towards Oracle.” The reporter never gives up. “Don’t you at least internally joke about your relationship with Oracle?”.

And that’s where I will now have a new answer for whichever reporter nexts goes down that line of reasoning.

So let me take that story from the beginning. My fourteen-year-old son has just started blogging about football, and his second blog entry is about an existential issue involving the moral values of loyalty and competition. After many years as a fan of Germany’s incumbent football team Bayern München, and after a not-so-great start of the season for the team, he went to a match with the local arch-rival TSV 1860. The 1860ers are not in the German First League, and they are somewhat of an underdog. And now he’s starting to question his loyalty towards Bayern München.

I shared his blog ponderings over email with the group of people formerly known as MySQL GmbH employees, one of whom saw a surprising analogy: Between Bayern München / TSV 1860 and Oracle / MySQL. It was so hilarious, that I dare share it, as a symbol of the type of stories we sometimes circulate internally. My son has two lists, “Why to stay with Bayern München” and “Why to switch to TSV 1860″. My colleague translates these football loyalty questions to database choice questions.

The blog is in German (as is my colleagues email), and instead of a complete but somewhat weird Google Translate conversion, I’ll here provide a slightly more polished translation (and the Oracle comments by my colleague in parenthesis):

These facts speak for continuing as a Bayern fan (… as an Oracle user):

1. I am still a member (I still use Oracle)
2. A sold-out stadium looks good (Oracle Datacenter looks good)
3. All my Bayern fan gadgets (all my Oracle fan gadgets)
4. The feeling of “Your hatred is our pride” (ditto)
5. German Premier League and Champions League, at least for the time being (ditto)
6. Some good players, such as Ribéry
7. I was always a Red [fan of Bayern], and “conversions” is bad form (I was always a fan of Oracle and …)

This speaks for a switch to TSV 1860 (… a switch to MySQL):

1. I’ll get tickets much easier (MySQL is lots easier to obtain)
2. My school is full of Lions [fans of 1860], I’d have fewer fights (there are so many MySQL Forums with helpful co-developers, even a MySQL Forum on Oracle)
3. The transfer policy of Bayern (the sales policy of Oracle)
4. The atmosphere in the stadium is somewhat better (the atmosphere at the MySQL user’s conference is clearly better)
5. Being an underdog feels good
6. More creative fans, including songs (there are creative MySQL songs, too!)
7. Sometimes when Bayern plays, you’re the only one who sings in your area of the stadium (plenty of MySQLers sing, even on YouTube!)
8. Frequently, Bayern fans are Bayern fans only “because they always win” (Frequently Oracle fans are Oracle fans and not Open Source fans, “because you’re not fired for buying Oracle”)

The conclusion, in database terms?

• MySQL co-exists with other databases, such as Oracle
• MySQL is often used for web apps in these coexistence scenarios
• MySQL focuses on applications that scale
• MySQL has a low TCO
• Oracle DBAs may want to add MySQL skills to their resume

Links, if you want to pursue the above thoughts:

• MySQL Resources for Oracle DBAs: http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/oracle/
• MySQL TCO Savings Calculator: http://www.mysql.com/tcosavings/
• DBA Boot Camp: MySQL for the Oracle DBA: http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/oracle/oracle_bootcamp/
• Oracle Users Indicate Increase in Use of Open Source: http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/mysql_wp_ioug.php
• MySQL Unlimited: Deploy an unlimited number of MySQL Enterprise Servers for the price of a single CPU of Oracle Enterprise Edition: http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/unlimited.html
• Lycos Europe Migrates to MySQL, Reduces TCO by 90%: http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/case-studies/mysql-lycos-casestudy.pdf
• T-Systems Relies on MySQL: http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/case-studies/mysql-tsystems-casestudy.pdf