I am going to Madrid, Spain, to participate in the Open Communities Forum on June 18-19.
As usual with Sun open events, the agenda includes several actors in the open source arena, such as MySQL, Java, Open Solaris, with topics ranging from web development to mobile integration.
It looks promising, and I look forward to this event, which is my first one in Spain.
On the first day, I will do an introductory talk about MySQL, and a more technical workshop for advanced users. The second day will be mainly dedicated to meeting users in the area, but I will also do a guest appearance in a talk about database testing.

About three weeks from now, Rickard Falkvinge (founder of the Pirate Party) will be kicking off the Vancouver Open Web Conference. He’ll be presenting a keynote on how, in just three years, a party with an odd name organized around a narrow electronic frontier platform has become the fourth largest political party in Sweden. It’s an amazing story that makes a good parable about how the world is changing and is a fitting start for a conference that we’ve (meaning mostly Jeff Griffiths, Malcolm van Delst, Mike Cantelon and Tim Whiteway) worked hard to make a careful balance of accessible, …

As I write this, my friend (and eLiberatica chair) Lucian is packing up to fly to Bucharest for this year’s instance of the eLiberatica Electronic Frontier/Free Software/Open Source conference. Sadly, I won’t be participating this year – a commitment to less travel and a new venture make doubly sure that I’m staying home.

Despite the downturn, it looks like this is going to be a great year for the conference: 400 people have registered and the list of speakers is formidable, including: OSI board member Danese Cooper, FSFE founder Georg Greve, MySQL founders David Axmark and Monty Widenius and Zbigniew “Gandalf” Branecki from Mozilla Europe.

If you are in or near Romania, you should try to …

The answer is yes – kind of.

Stored procedures are implemented in a MySQL Server and can be used regardless of the storage engine being used for a specific table. One inference from this is that they won’t work when accessing the Cluster database directly through the NDB API.

This leads to the question of whether or not that limitation actually restricts what you can achieve. This article gives a brief introduction to stored procedures and looks at how the same results can be achieved using the NDB API.

Stored procedures provide a rudimentary way of implementing functionality within the database (rather than in the application code). They are implemented by the database designer and have the ability to perform computations as well as make changes to the data in the database. A typical use of stored procedures would be to control all access to the data by a user or application – for example, to impose extra checks on …

What: Sydney Oracle Meetup #3 - Focus on E-Business Suite + Oracle/Sun deal
When: April 28, 2009 5:30 PM
Where: As usual - Sydney Mechanics School of Art
How: just register at the SOM website.

We have to limit the number of people to 40 this time so make sure you RSVP timely!

We are gathering at 5:30pm and technical goodies are starting at 6pm so use this time to catch up with other members. We should finish by 8:30pm including a beaks and some post follow up. The presentation schedule is a bit floating this time.

As usual, we should have some pizza and beverages facilitating seamless peer networking. ;-)

In addition to the main topic, we plan to have some overview of Oracle / Sun deal and share what everyone thinks about it + report from the …

Jetlagged from transatlantic travel, I woke up in the middle of the Californian night thinking about what has changed since I arrived at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara on Sunday evening. I was pondering all the questions MySQL users and Sun colleagues were asking at the event, and what the user base was thinking out loud on Twitter yesterday.

What has changed is obviously that Sun Microsystems and Oracle announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun.

What further changes we will see as a result of that is a different story. Evidently, I don’t sit in with a crystal ball predicting what will happen next. Nor do I have insight into Oracle’s plans for MySQL, …

On January the 9th, 2009 I've presented at the 3rd Annual Gestionale Open Developer Conference.

Gestionale Open is an open source ERP gathering interest in Italy, since it is compliant with local laws. This project has been started years ago by an entrepreneur with decades of experience in the field and now it's used by 100s of customers. They have concluded the porting to MySQL, which is now the default database for the product!

There were nearly 100 participants. Gestionale Open has catalyzed the interest of customers, distributors, software developers. It's nice to see complex business applications moving to open source.

The title of my presentation was: "Enterprise Innovation". I've chosen a banal title, but wishing to make an interesting dissertation on why MySQL is fuelling the innovation and who is using MySQL to seed projects and evolve from simple ideas to real business.

You can …

The last couple of years, I have had the pleasure of moderating panels at the MySQL Conference. Last year, it was about scaling MySQL, and the year before that, it was the Clash of the DB Egos.

For this year, the original plan was for a MySQL Roadmap Shootout. Many of these questions Karen Tegan Padir should address in her opening keynote, and Robin Schumacher and Rob Young will dig deeper in “The Future of MySQL“.

Hence, we decided to aim higher: We’re going for the clouds. This year’s new topic is “ …

Tomorrow, The Big Trek starts. Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana will spend the time from then on until the MySQL Conference and Expo starts travelling by rail and bus all the way from home in Montreal to California. Hence the name “Dups on Rails”. The purpose of the Big Trek is to talk about MySQL in Canadian and US universities. He’ll also arrange MySQL Meetups and go on customer visits, as people ping him.

Towards the end of the trip, as we get closer to the User Conference, Dups won’t be alone. His alter ego Colin Charles (yes, people do mix up Dups and Colin) will join him from 13 April onwards in Northern California. And at the same time, a parallel trek is started by Giuseppe Maxia an Sheeri K. Cabral, in Southern California.

The list of universities include Queens University, University of Western Ontario, Illinois Institute of Technology, Purdue University, University of …

In MySQL 5.1.33 there is a fix for an apparently innocuous bug.
Bug #36540 CREATE EVENT and ALTER EVENT statements fail with large server_id.
This is a usability bug, that makes the DBA life unnecessarily hard. The reason for having a large server_id is because a DBA might want to use the IP address as server ID, to make sure that there are unique IDs, and to have an easy way of identifying the server through the IP.
All is well until you mix the server_id assignment with event creation:

 select version();
+-----------+
| version() |
+-----------+
| 5.1.32    | 
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

 set global server_id =inet_aton('192.168.2.55');
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

 select @@server_id;
+-------------+
| @@server_id |
+-------------+
| …