I'm back home from DrupalCon 2008 now - it has been a great event! I met a lot of nice people from the Drupal Community and learned a lot about this CMS. I've been very busy in uploading the remaining pictures from the event to my gallery - so here's for your viewing pleasure:

• Impressions from Szeged
• Day One - 2008-08-27
• Day Two - 2008-08-28
• …

Hello and greetings from DrupalCon 2008 in Szeged, Hungary!

We (Thierry Manfé, Scott Mattoon and myself) are having a great time manning our booth and talking about Drupal, MySQL and Open Source@Sun with the nice crowd of Drupal Users and Developers here. Sun is a gold sponsor of the event and we're giving a number of sessions as well.

Today I gave my first presentation about MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices - unfortunately I ran a tad bit out of time at the end... The slides have already been attached to the session page, so you can read up on the last few things I was going to talk about. Feel free to contact me, if you have further questions!

Tomorrow I'll be talking about …

Being able to use an Open Source DBMS to manage your data is nice, but what good would it be if you can't easily access it from your applications? One key factor to the popularity of MySQL is probably its wide range of available language bindings, which started with support for C, PHP and Perl from early on.

I've tried to gather a list of languages and their respective MySQL drivers/modules below. It's by no means complete or exhaustive, but I think I covered quite a lot of popular as well as exotic programming languages.

There is a number of connectors which are actually developed by the Sun Database Group (aka MySQL) itself and that are ready to use:

• Connector/ODBC - Standardized database driver Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix platforms.
• …

Just to remind you that Packt Publishing is running their Open Source CMS Award again:

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) that have been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. Now entering its third year, the Award has established itself as an important measure for quality and the popularity of Open Source Content Management Systems.

You have two more weeks to submit your favourite CMS in the following categories:

• Overall Winner
• …

I recently added two new packages to my repository on the openSUSE Build Service:

• Maatkit is a collection of essential command-line utilities for MySQL. Each is completely stand-alone, without dependencies other than core Perl and the DBI drivers needed to connect to MySQL, and doesn't need to be "installed" - you can just execute the scripts. This makes the tools easy to use on systems where you can't install anything extra, such as customer sites or ISPs.
• protobuf - Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format. Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol …

Are you a member of a local Linux User Group? Or a MySQL User Group? Or any other group that is related to open source software? Have you heard of the Software Freedom Day yet? This is a good opportunity to spread the word and showcase what OSS is all about to a wider audience. Some quotes from their Software Freedom Day website:

Software Freedom Day is a global, grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of software freedom and the virtues and availability of Free and Open Source Software. Local teams from all over the world organise events on the third Saturday in September.
Software Freedom Day is a global celebration and education …

As last year, MySQL will host three Customer Conferences in Europe. They will take place at the following dates and locations:

• Thursday, October 23, 2008: London, UK
• Tuesday, October 21, 2008: Munich, Germany
• Wednesday, November 19, 2008: Paris, France

The content differs slightly per location, but there will be sessions in two parallel tracks on a wide range of topics, including success stories from customers as well as talks on very technical/practical topics. Here are some excerpts from the agenda for the UK Event:

• Delivering Web 2.0 Applications with MySQL and …

Today, the root file system on our public svn server nearly ran out of disk space. The reason? The /tmp directory was quickly filling up with temporary files created by websvn, which I set up parallel to the FishEye repository browser for testing purposes. A quick investigation of the apache log files revealed the culprit - a crawler from Microsoft was running haywire and decided to ignore the rules in the robots.txt file, even though it did actually looked at the file before!

Here is how robots.txt looked like (I now changed it to disallow everything):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /fisheye/
Disallow: /websvn/

If I am not mistaken, no crawler should actually consider going into the SVN browser directories. Some snippets from the apache log:

I just got informed that two of my session proposals for DrupalCon 2008 got accepted - I will be speaking about the following topics there:

• MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices
• High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo

The second talk will be held in cooperation with Jakub Suchy, who will take over the practical demo. Sun Microsystems is a Gold …

In a recent article, Matt Asay was musing about the aspects of hosting an Open Source project by yourself vs. using a public project hosting service like SourceForge, GitHub or Launchpad. He concluded that it's important for commercial/sponsored open source projects in particular to do the hosting by themselves, so they can maintain full control and can gain more insight, which hopefully will turn into more revenue at some point.

However, Matt seems to reduce "hosting" to "providing downloads" only:

Control and visibility. Given the importance of customer conversions, it becomes hugely valuable information to know that it takes, say, eight months on average for someone to buy the "Enterprise" version of …