FOSDEM, the Free and Opensource Conference, will again take place in Brussels, Belgium on Saturday and Sunday (6th and 7th February, 2010). Now happening for the 10th time (congratulations!), it is one of the largest Open Source conferences in Europe, with a strong focus on developers. Sun/MySQL have been regular sponsors of and contributors to the event in the past and it is alway a great experience to be there. It's very rare to meet so many well-known and bright people from such a wide range of OSS projects.

They have now opened their Call for Participation - the organizers are seeking input on talks for the main conference tracks (deadline: 2009-11-22) , …

It's almost two weeks now since FrOSCon and the OpenSQL Camp subconference have taken place in Sankt Augustin, Germany — about time for a summary and update from my side!

First off, I would like to thank all of the participants and supporters, particularly my colleagues Regina Steyer and Iris Musiol for the perfect logistics and co-sponsoring as well as Uli Graef, Thorsten Frueauf, Matthias Schmidt, Alexander Rubin and Joerg Moellenkamp for manning the Sun booth and the help on site.

Another big Thank You goes out to my team mates …

IPC 2009, the International PHP Conference will take place on November 15th-18th in Karlsruhe, Germany. While the deadline for the call for papers for the main conference program has already passed, there is still an opportunity to submit MySQL-related content: the organizers plan to have a special MySQL Day, which will take place on Tuesday, 17th of November.

Quoting for the Call for Papers web page:

We are looking for speakers joining the Architecture Day or the MySQL Day. "Architecture", in terms of project organization, business organization, tools & approaches etc. is becoming a key qualification to developers and teams. And MySQL still is one of the most common open source databases used in many of todays leading web applications. The International PHP Conference will …

I'm happy to announce that the schedule for OpenSQL Camp 2009 (European Edition) has been published on the FrOSCon timetable now. We have a great selection of topics and speakers, so don't miss it! OpenSQL Camp is a subconference of FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source Conference, which will take place on August 22nd and 23rd in St. Augustin, Germany.

The admission fee for the entire conference (both days, incl. OpenSQL Camp) is 5 EUR, you can pre-register here until August 10th (and if you do so today, you will still get a free T-Shirt as well!). Of course, you …

The Call for Papers for the OpenSQL Camp 2009 (European Edition) has ended yesterday — we received 27 excellent session proposals from various Open Source Database projects. I would like to say a big "Thank You" to everyone who submitted a talk! In the beginning I was a bit concerned that the conference would become too MySQL-centric, but this fortunately changed in the last few days.

Sadly we now have more than double the amount of sessions than we can actually host, which means that we will have to review and vote on the sessions to distill the final program. We've formed a small committee that will perform this task (currently consisting of …

I've now posted all the current talk submissions to the OpenSQL Camp Wiki. A big Thank You to everyone who contributed so far and helped us to bang the drum for this event! If you haven't heard about OpenSQL Camp yet, it's a subconference of the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in St. Augustin, Germany, which takes place on August 22+23. The topic of OpenSQL Camp is "Open Source databases and related technologies" and we're looking for interesting presentations in this field.

As we have 12 session slots to fill, we still have room for at least 6 more submissions! It's also a tad bit MySQL-centric at the moment, that should definitely change! We would love to get some more diversity to cover a broader range of Open Source Database technology.

So please submit your talk proposals and help …

Last week I gave a MySQL University Presentation about how to contribute code to MySQL. This time DimDim did not fail to record the session, even though there is a funky overlap of audio from Stefan Hinz (the moderator) and myself at the beginning. I had a bit of a slow start into the presentation, because of a very nasty headache that plagued me that day. But we had a lively discussion at the end and I hope it was useful to the participants.

In case you have missed it, you can now watch the playback or download the session slides:

• Presentation slides: MySQL Code Contributions (PDF)
• …

After a long hiatus, I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.12 has now been released. This release includes a large number of improvements, minor code cleanups, as well as some new functionality. In particular, I would like to thank Matthew Boehm, Tim Stoop, Baron Schwartz, Ville Skyttä and Ronald Bradford for their contributions.

Some notable highlights from the ChangeLog:

• Removed the absolute path names to external tools (make sure $PATH is correct)
• Added --log-err to the startup options of the recovery instance to avoid cluttering the server's error log
• Added support for hooks written as Perl Modules. (Matthew Boehm)
• Added support for date/time-formatted path names for backupdir and mountdir (Matthew Boehm)
• Backupdir and …

Giuseppe stumbled over this website and recommended it to me as a potential useful service for organizing the registrations of the OpenSQL Camp: Eventbrite is a Python/MySQL-powered web site (judging from their job openings) that provides the following:

Eventbrite is the leading provider of online event management and ticketing services. Eventbrite makes it easy for anyone to hold a successful event of any type and size. Eventbrite is free if your event is free. If you sell tickets to your event, Eventbrite collects a small fee per ticket. So just like you, Eventbrite wants your event …

Just spotted the following posting from Paul DuBois on the internals mailing list:

I'm engaged in a project (WL#3403) to compile information that will provide better information about our errors and error messages:

• What an error means
• Likely causes of the error
• How to rectify or work around the error

The general idea is to provide our users something more than a list of error codes and the messages from errmsg.txt, such as the manual currently includes here:

…