Background

For several years, MySQL User Groups have been organizing their meetings with Meetup.com, a service that simplifies event management. However, MySQL User group organizers received a surprise message from Meetup.com a few days ago.

We were all taken by surprise by Meetup's sudden announcement and allegation that MySQL "did not want to sponsor" the users groups, because there is a valid agreement between MySQL and meetup.com. The agreement is still in effect, ending on June 10, 2009.

Apparently, there was some miscommunication inside Meetup.com, because the group organizers received a message stating that they should now pay for meetup services, which they used to get for free, thanks to MySQL sponsorship.

It took us a few days to track the origin of the misunderstanding, and when we …

This Thursday (November 6, 2008), Jay Pipes will guide you on a tour of Bazaar and Launchpad for beginners. Since Jay is located in Columbus, Ohio, this session will start later than usual, that is, at 17:00 UTC / 9:00am PDT / 12:00 EST / 17:00 BST / 18:00 CET.

Getting to know Bazaar and Launchpad is certainly interesting for most developers, but it's a "must-know" for anyone thinking of contributing code to MySQL, since MySQL development has been using Bazaar and Launchpad for quite a while now.

While I'm at it: 

On the eve of the Berlin Marathon a few weeks ago, I saw Santa Claus on skates, which reminded me …

The next MySQL University session will take place this Thursday, 30th October. Giuseppe Maxia will get you up to speed with using MySQL Sandbox for quick and easy testing of MySQL.

This session will start at 15:00 Central European Time (14:00 UTC, 14:00 BST).

MySQL University is an educational program run virtually on the 'net. Sessions are open to anyone. MySQL University focuses on MySQL internals and on Sun technology that can be used in connection with MySQL, but we're open to hear your suggestions for other topics. Go to this page and fill in your suggestions!

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After a series of tests, we've just conducted the first MySQL University session using a new conferencing system, Dimdim, and I thought I'd let you know how it went.

MySQL University is an educational program for engineers from Sun/MySQL and the MySQL community, Dimdim is the new conferencing system that we hope will be able to replace our old presentation system, and "we" isn't plurale majestatis but rather refers to the guys running the MySQL University program, the Sun Database Group documentation team.

I started the Dimdim session fifteen minutes before the hour, and when the two presenters arrived we did a sound check. Petr and David connected from Sun offices in Prague, Czechia, and California, respectively, and I was on a DSL line in my home office in Berlin, Germany. Sound …

Update to tomorrow's MySQL University session: Petr will start presenting how to use NetBeans for writing PHP. David will continue showing how to use it with MySQL. To set expectations correctly, we've renamed the MySQL University to Working with PHP and MySQL in NetBeans.

Petr Pisl from the NetBeans team will be David Van Couvering's co-presenter for the MySQL University session this Thursday (see the announcement I posted yesterday). While David will focus on NetBeans with MySQL, Petr will demonstrate what NetBeans can do for PHP programmers, a species that uses MySQL all the time. Thanks for joining in, Petr!

In his recent …