The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

Canonical has just announced that the Ubuntu Developer Summit will no longer be face to face and every six months. Instead it will be entirely online and virtual, using Google Hangouts. (Here is the announcement.)

On the surface, this seems like a good idea: It's cheaper monetarily, it appears to open things up to people who are unable to travel, and it makes it easier to make complete records.

However, I think it's a bad idea, for several interrelated reasons.

Some decision making needs face-time to happen. For whatever reasons, internet-only communication is not enough for a good enough "meeting of the minds" for sticky or subtle engineering and design decisionmaking.

The IETF, who probably have the longest history of any organization ever of online internet-enabled …

Background: SkySQL is a distributed company. Nearly all of us work from home. To be productive, we need to emulate the best aspects of collaborating as if we were working next to one another. Given that nearly all of us had worked under similar distributed conditions at MySQL AB, we knew what we were getting into when we were founded. Obviously, we wanted to learn from our past experiences when making our choices for tools and processes.

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"Life is", goes a saying in my native Finland, a country not known for using superfluous words. While this saying may take compactness a tad too far, it's a great way to say "things happen", mostly to stoically adapt, sometimes to justify actions taken in order to adapt. The brevity of the expression adds not just to the perceived wisdom, but also makes resistance futile. The expected and usual reaction is agreement; I have yet to experience a situation where somebody would counterargue that "life is not".

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While Oracle deserves some praise for its donation of OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Foundation, it is disappointing again to see a legitimate open source market contender that has been marginalized by miscommunication and mismanagement of the project by a large vendor.

OpenOffice.org, warts and all, was probably the most significant competition for Microsoft Office for years and in many ways demonstrated the advantages of open source, helping usher in wider use of it, as well as greater usability. OO.o was in fact my reason for originally investigating and moving to open source software more than a decade ago. Regardless of past mismanagement of community and technology, that competitive factor has been diminished greatly since Oracle took ownership of OO.o. Now, after prompting a fork — as has …

So I sometimes get asked if we funnel back bug reports or patches back to MySQL from Drizzle. Also, MariaDB adds some interest here as they are a lot closer (and indeed compatible with) to MySQL. With Drizzle, we have deviated really quite heavily from the MySQL codebase. There are still some common areas, but they’re getting rarer (especially to just directly apply a patch).

Back in June 2009, while working on Drizzle at Sun, I found a bug that I knew would affect both. The patch would even directly apply (well… close, but I made one anyway).

So the typical process of me filing a MySQL bug these days is:

• Stewart files bug
• In the next window of Sveta being awake, it’s verified.

…

The tracks of this year's "MySQL & Friends" Developer Room at FOSDEM 2010 have now been scheduled - please check the Wiki page for details on the talks as well as some background information about the speakers. This info should soon be available via the FOSDEM conference system as well. We had some last-minute changes and we actually managed to schedule two more talks due to a small glitch in the initial calculation. The topics look very interesting, we hope that we can provide some valuable information for developers, users as well as MySQL DBAs!

One of our speakers (Kris Buytaert) suggested to arrange a joint dinner for Saturday evening, which is indeed a good idea! Thankfully he also volunteered for coordinating it - thanks in advance! …

We are happy to announce the selected sessions for our "MySQL and Friends" developer room at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. It will take place on Sunday, 7th of February from 9:00-17:00 in Room AW1.121.

In total, we received 20 submissions from 15 speakers. We'd like to thank them very much for their great proposals!

As we only have 12 speaking slots (20 mins each) available that day, we first needed to perform a selection process. Unfortunately there wasn't enough time to perform a full-blown voting process that involved the community at large. Since we didn't want to do this in a completely closed committee, we decided to involve all speakers that submitted a talk in this.

After this voting process, the final candidates are (ordered by last name).

Update: Mikael …

A Happy New Year to all of you! About a month ago we posted our initial Call for Papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. We already received several great submissions and we'd like to thank the speakers who contributed their suggestions so far. But we would like to get some more!

Therefore we decided to extend the deadline for a few more days: you can still submit your talk proposals until tomorrow (Wednesday, 6th)!

So if you think you have an interesting MySQL-related topic to talk about, we'd like to hear about it! Thanks.

Do you plan to attend the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in St. Augustin, Germany on August 22 & 23? Are you a fan of MySQL and would you like to share your knowledge about it with other users? Here is your chance!

Sun Microsystems is a Gold sponsor of FrOSCon this year and will also be present with a booth there on both days. In addition to demo stations about Open HA Cluster, OpenSolaris and NetBeans, Sun will also provide space for a MySQL info desk, which we would like to turn into a "Guru Bar", including members of the MySQL community.

The goal is to talk with existing and potential new MySQL users, share …