It's time for another Meetup of the Hamburg MySQL User Group! As for previous events, we'll meet on Monday, 2nd of April at 19:00 in the Chinese restaurant Ni Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek.

This time there will be a presentation about "Xing/OpenBC growing pains", held by Erick Dennis und Michael Otto from epublica, the company behind Xing.com.

The talk will be held in english and is a rehearsal for their presentation at our upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo, which will take place from April 23rd-26th in Santa Clara, California. Please subscribe to our …

I just stumbled over Sebastian's blog entry:

The second Free and Open Source Conference "FrOSCon" takes place on August, 25th and 26th 2007 in Sankt Augustin, near Bonn, Germany. The conference is once again hosted by the faculty of computer science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in collaboration with the student body and the Linux/Unix User Group Sankt Augustin.

I attended FrOSCon last year and found it a very pleasant conference to be …

Mandy and I were working together on some accounting for Foo Associates earlier today. We were scratching down notes in an old notebook when I ran across some old bits and pieces from my days at MySQL - random lists of tasks, flight schedules, doodlings and this little snippet of text under the hotel address for OSCON 2002:

Flying into Salt Lake City is amazing. The terrain looks unfinished, like the surface of a moon recently given life. The Great Salt Lake spreads out past the horizon and, when low enough, you can see the weird and wonderful patterns formed by salt, evaporation and algae spreading out like plumes of gas boiling off a star.

Later, driving past the lake with an acquaintance, I remember being nearly equally amazed at the “dead sea creature in the hot sun” smell that rolls off of it.

…

My MySQL Sandalcamp proposal made the cut for the upcoming MySQL Conference. I hope that I will see some of you down in Santa Clara in April.

FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting will again take place in Brussels, Belgium on February, 24th & 25th. I went there last year and really had a great time. This year, I submitted a proposal for a lightning talk, which has been accepted! I've just been informed that the lightning talk schedule is now published. My talk "What's new at MySQL AB" will be on Saturday, at 17:00. I look forward to being there!

I just learned from my colleagues in our Dublin office that Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB will be visiting them this coming weekend. They would like to take this opportunity to arrange a MySQL User Group Meeting, which will take place on Saturday, 27th of January, 18:00 o'clock in their offices:

MySQL Ireland,
Ground Floor, Misys Building,
Eastpoint Business Park,
Dublin 3
Ireland

This is your chance to meet and talk with Mårten and other MySQLers. There will also be free food and drinks and most likely a tech talk about MySQL (details will follow). So if you are located somewhere around Dublin, make sure to attend this event!

I've already sent out the invitation and announcements to various channels, but let me repeat it once more: the 5th Hamburg MySQL User Group Meetup is coming up on Monday, 5th of Februrary. So far, 15 people have already RSVPed, so it's going to be a fun evening again. If you have not done so yet, please register via meetup.com or Xing soon! I will give a 15 minute lightning talk about "What's new at MySQL AB", but we're still looking for another MySQL-related talk. If you want to share your experiences with MySQL or talk about a certain application or tool that has a relation to MySQL, please let me know! As usual, we'll meet a 19:00 at the Chinese Restaurant "Ni Hao", …

If you happen to live somewhere around Delhi, India and you are curious to learn more about MySQL Cluster, make sure to RSVP for Kai's Workshop on this subject, which will take place on Friday, November 17, 2006, 6:00 PM at Value One, D 21 NDSE 1, Delhi. Space is limited, so hurry!

I personally will also mention MySQL Cluster during my talk about High Availability Solutions with MySQL that I will give at the Fachhochschule Oldenburg/Ostfriesland/Wilhelmshaven tomorrow.

If you happen to live somewhere around Delhi, India and you are curious to learn more about MySQL Cluster, make sure to RSVP for Kai's Workshop on this subject, which will take place on Friday, November 17, 2006, 6:00 PM at Value One, D 21 NDSE 1, Delhi. Space is limited, so hurry!

I personally will also mention MySQL Cluster during my talk about High Availability Solutions with MySQL that I will give at the Fachhochschule Oldenburg/Ostfriesland/Wilhelmshaven tomorrow.

It is really noticable that the summer is over now. While it was quite silent during the past few months, the last quarter of the year will be packed with conferences and events again.

And we will contribute our share to it, too: in addition to sending speakers to various upcoming events, MySQL will also host two European MySQL User conferences next week. The MySQL Northern Europe Customer Conference will take place in London (UK), on Tuesday, October 17th 2006. Two days later, the MySQL Central Europe Customer Conference will be held in Munich (Germany) on Thursday, October 19th 2006. Both are one-day events, with two tracks of talks in parallel. The sessions will be held by both MySQL employees as well as customers, talking about their experiences in using MySQL …