If so, you should check out OpenSQLCamp 2009, European Edition. November last year, the home of OpenSQL Camp was Charlottesville, VA, but now it is time to have something a bit more local. OpenSQL Camp will take place Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd of August, in St. Augustin, Germany, so it could do for a nice August getaway to Germany.

It’s not really the biggest of cities, but then again, that is part of the charm, going to some small city and learning more about databases.
In case you do happen to be curious, feel free to check out the list of proposed sessions, although it is not complete, it does give a overview of what to expect.

I for one am looking forward to a European event, as it seems like most things is based in the US, and that means travel time will be less and no …

Last weekend, my brother and I attended SELF 2009. A few thoughts on it:

The mixture of sessions was interesting. There were some really good ones. I think the best session I attended was an OpenSolaris/NetBeans/Glassfish/Virtualbox/ZFS session, given by a Sun employee. He was an excellent presenter, and really showed off the strengths of the technologies in a nice way. He started up enough VMs to make his OpenSolaris laptop chew into swap, and I thought it was fun to see how it dealt with that. I’ve heard Solaris and OpenSolaris do a lot better at avoiding and managing swapping than GNU/Linux, but I couldn’t make any opinion from watching. I did think it was odd to have this session at a “Linux” (yes, they left off the GNU) conference. But I thought the session was a good addition to the conference. In other sessions, and in the hallways and expo, there was a lot more …

In my opinion, OpenSQL Camp 2008 was a great success. (Give your opinion too.) I have to spend the next couple of days catching up on other things that have gotten delayed, but will try to write more about the experience later. In the meantime, I want to give a heartfelt thanks [...]

Brian Aker delivers the keynote speech at OpenSQL Camp: State of the Open Source Databases. The presentation begins with a disclaimer:
“There is no way I’m going to tell you exactly where the future of databases go. We have way too many egos in the room to ever even begin a discussion…”
and ends with Aker saying,
“What the hell does that mean?”

View the video online at
http://technocation.org/node/649/play
or download the 42.6 MB Flash video file (.flv) directly at http://technocation.org/node/649/download.

My summary: …

(one note, I have updated a previous blog post by adding the video for the LISA presentation I gave entitled “How to Stop Hating MySQL”)

OpenSQL Camp is in full swing! Baron Schwartz has done an amazing job organizing this free unconference.

We are well into the 2nd session of the day, and the quality of the presentations is excellent (though I expected that!) and it is always great to see people.

Some pictures….
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So, I actually started my trip early, the taxi picked me up from my house in Malta at 5:15am, and after a short stop in the lounge for some breakfast, I boarded KM100 bound for Heathrow. After a layover there, I eventually arrived at Dulles International, and there was no queue for US customs and border patrol!

Picked up the rental car and drove the 101 miles to Charlottesville, VA — in dense fog.

Met with Sheeri and talked for a bit on Thursday, before just falling asleep, due to time difference and the long travel.

So on Friday, we had a few hours to run errands and pick up last minute stuff that we had forgot back home and so on, before the start at 6pm. Met up with everyone, had some nice interesting conversations and towards the end of the night, 14 of us decided that it was time for dinner, so we went over to a local restaurant. Lots of …

The soft registration deadline for OpenSQL Camp 2008 has passed now; you can still attend, but you won’t be counted into meals and t-shirts. Meanwhile, we have 90 registered attendees, and a truly impressive set of sessions from heavy hitters in the database world. This conference is turning into the event I always [...]

OpenSQL Camp is a free unconference happening Friday, Nov. 14th through Sunday, Nov. 16th in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. More details can be found at http://www.opensqlcamp.org.

Whether or not you have already registered for OpenSQL Camp by putting your name here:

http://www.opensqlcamp.org/index.php?title=Events/2008/AttendeeList

you should be aware of very important information.
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There’s a Facebook event for OpenSQL Camp. If you RSVP to it, your friends will find out, and that will help spread the word.

Want to promote OpenSQL Camp 2008? Use one of the sweet badges shown on this page. A big thank-you to Fixpert for the logo and badges!

There’s a PNG format and a GIF format. To use the badge, download the image, then save it to your server and use the HTML shown below [...]