I made it to the US safely, even though I almost missed my connecting flight in Heathrow (even my luggage made it, hooray!). I reached the Hotel just in time to directly head off to the traditional pre-conference party at Mårten's house. However, we just stayed there shortly (barely long enough to say hi to everybody) and then headed to the MySQL pre-conference dinner (organized by Arjen). It was nice meeting such a large number of the key MySQL community people in one place! I was especially surprised about the presence of Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green - this added a nice touch!

Today I am attending Stewart's …

Were there too many "my"'s in that title? Anyway… this week's MySQL conference is promising to be really busy and exciting. I can't wait to finally be there and experience it in all its glory. Thanks to the O'Reilly personal conference planner and scheduler and the advice of my fellow conference goers, I was able to easily (not really) pick out the speeches I am most interested in attending.

Here goes (my pass doesn't include Monday ):

Tuesday

8:30am Tuesday, 04/15/2008

State of MySQL

…

April 14-17th is going to be an exciting time. Why? Because the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo is going to be held in Santa Clara, CA. Who would want to miss out on a chance to lurk around, let alone talk to, some of the smartest people in the MySQL world? Well, those who don't have at least $1000+, of course. A 3 day pass to the conference without tutorials costs a whopping $1199. A full pass would dry up your pockets $1499.

Well, "good news everyone". Thanks to Sheeri Cabral of The Pythian Group, PlanetMySQL.org, Jeremy, and, …

As Kaj already pointed out, the Sun/MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour will also make a stop in Munich, Germany this Friday. I will be there as well, we will meet at 14:00 at the Hilton Munich Park Hotel. Kaj and some other Sun people will join us a bit later. If you are in the area, make sure to stop by!

By the way, the Meetup Mashup Tour will make at least one more stop in Germany - I am organizing an event in Hamburg, Germany which will take place on Monday, April 7th (19:00). This was initially planned as another regular MySQL Meetup, but I offered to expand the scope a bit. We will now meet at the Sun offices, Sun will sponsor some food and drinks! In addition to …

Courtesy of our friends at Oracle cost containment company Miro Consulting, I am giving a webinar tomorrow at 1pm EST (click this link for the time in other timezones please. The subject I’ve chosen is how to apply the best practices around advanced supply management that are extremely successful and mature in the product supply [...]

Since almost a year now, we host a weekly training session for our engineers on Thursday (14:00 UTC winter time), coined the "MySQL University". While it's primary purpose is to share and distribute knowledge about a wide variety of topics relevant to our own developers, many of the sessions are of general interest for developers on other projects as well.

Therefore we hold this sessions in the public and everybody is welcome to attend! You can listen to the presentation via an OGG Audio stream, questions can be posted via IRC on the #mysql-university channel on freenode.net. The audio file and IRC log will be saved, so you can also listen to past university sessions at a later point in time again.

… or, “Making Event Attendance Count”

Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I didn’t) then a naive estimation of costs would have been something like this:

• ~20 000 km of air travel (Vancouver to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Helsinki. Return.)
• ~7 000+ CAD of costs (flights, hotels, taxis, meals, time) (borne by a combination of eZ Systems, the Mozilla Foundation and the …

Just a short reminder: the Hamburg MySQL Meetup Group will meet next week, on Monday the 4th of February! As usual, there will be a MySQL-related talk - this time I will use this opportunity to practice my talk about "Performing MySQL Backups using LVM Snapshots" that I will present at the upcoming MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 in Santa Clara, CA. In addition to that I assume that there will be some questions about the acquisition of MySQL AB by Sun - I will try to answer these as good as I can. Looking forward to meet you next week. Please make sure to RSVP either via Meetup.com or …

I am happy to announce that I have been selected to speak at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 on April 14-17, 2008 in Santa Clara, CA. The topic of my talk will be "Performing MySQL Backups using LVM Snapshots" - and I will of course include a plug for the mylvmbackup tool

From the abstract:

Modern Linux distributions provide a very advanced technology to maintain and administer storage devices, called “Logical Volume Manager” (LVM). Among providing several benefits over using plain hard disk partitions, one of the unique features of LVM is the capability to create snapshots of file systems on the fly. This functionality comes in handy for performing consistent …

There is a lot of exciting stuff happening inside of MySQL AB. But due to the distributed nature of our company it's hardly possible to get a good overview about what the various teams of our development department are currently working on and what they have achieved since the last time we met.

So one cool new idea for our currently ongoing MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg was to let developers show off their work to each other. They were encouraged to prepare demos, either in the form of slide shows or by running live demonstrations from their laptops. Last Thursday and Saturday we allocated time for these team exhibitions and the exhibitors set up tables in the meeting rooms for others to sit next to them, see the new and cool stuff and chat about it. The non-exhibiting attendees received a sheet of paper where they could collect signatures for each demo point they visited, the one that managed to see the most demos was eligible for …