Tuesday evening, Moscow was our next stop. Engineering, Support, Internal IT, Professional Services — as in Sweden, various MySQL departments were represented. Russia is a key personnel country for MySQL, and has been so for years. It’s my third time with MySQL in Moscow, and it feels good to start being able to find Count Dolgorukyi, Arbat, St. Basil’s Cathedral, Kremlin, the Red Square, and the Tverskaya Ulitsa.

So as not to bore you with repeating the MySQL on-boarding discussions we had, which were much the same as everywhere else, let me instead share our experience of how to login into Russia, and, more complicated, Marriott Grand Hotel on Tverskaya.

Scene 1: Yesterday, 15:00, Domodedovo airport, Rusaero Biznes Terminal.

• Immigration lady: Do you need an immigration card?
• We: Uhmm, if you say so
• No further action, we depart from Domodedovo, which …

After Dublin, our next stop on the World Tour was Sweden. While several MySQLers were out on travel (in Dublin, amongst other places!) related to the Sun-MySQL integration, we had the opportunity to meet with Swedish MySQL employees from various parts of the organisation, including Sales, Engineering, Support, and Internal IT.

Yesterday’s dinner at Domtrappkällaren was a memorable one, with an opportunity to share war stories and anecdotes with our Sun colleagues Dave Douglas and Julie Ross. They got their fair share of tales from past MySQL Developer Meetings (ah, Prague! ohh, Sorrento!) and Staff Meetings (you wouldn’t believe what happened to this new guy in Sales on his first day, when arriving at his hotel room in Cancùn).

Equally important, we took time to look at what will happen next. Swedes will in short order be on-boarded, which involves everything form signing papers to getting their first salary from Sun, as …

“If you’d like to get out of the aircraft quickly, and we’re not around to help you, grab this red handle on the door and pull it up.” Our friendly pilot just gave us his friendly security instructions at take-off from Dublin airport, on the way to Bromma in Stockholm. Dave Douglas, Julie Ross and myself are heading on the first leg of our trip to meet MySQL personnel across Europe.

I’ve been frequently teased about using “Sun’s Corporate Jet”. Flying around on that one is certainly perceived as glamorous, and perhaps not compatible with the humble roots of MySQL. Well, glamorous or not, here we are, three people, three empty seats and two pilots up in the sky. However, it’s not exactly “Sun’s” jet. It’s Netjets, more like a taxi than a company car. We’re going to have a different pilot tomorrow, and a different plane. That said, I do enjoy it and I took my favourite gadget, my 8mm fisheye lens, …

Are you close to Munich? Are you available next Friday afternoon? Would you like to meet some MySQLers? And some Sun employees, whom we hope to lure from Sun’s German headquarters in Heimstetten?

Then, come to the Hilton where many of the Bundesliga football clubs stay when playing against FC Bayern München: Munich Hilton am Tucherpark, close to Englischer Garten.

I suggest you to be there at about 14:30. We theoretically start at 14, but two Sun execs and I are arriving late from Hamburg that same afternoon. We expect to be there by 14:45.

What will we discuss?

Well, the setup is the same as for many other meetups, between MySQLers, customers, community, and Sun employees. We’ll tell you that we’re continuing our support of all popular operating systems, and all popular development environments — just like we’ve stressed elsewhere. We’ll share our thinking on what will change and what will stay the …

The World Tour starts on IRC next week!

The schedule is as follows:

• Wed 5 March 2008: Ian Murdock, 7am PT/16 CET. Ian is the ian of Debian and Chief OS Platform Strategist at Sun Microsystems. Wikipedia puts it like this:
  

  Since joining Sun, he has led Project Indiana, which he describes as “taking the lesson that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris,” making a full OpenSolaris distribution with GNOME and userland tools from GNU plus a network-based package management system.

• Thu 6 March 2008: Simon Phipps 6am PT/15CET. Simon is Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems. …

I hope I’ll have the opportunity to meet you in person soon.

A face to face meeting may indeed be possible, if our World Tour celebrating the acquisition of MySQL by Sun has a stop close to you, and if I happen to be lucky to be attending that particular meetup just announced:

To toast the success of the acquisition and engage with customers, employees, community developers and partners, Sun and MySQL executives will kick-off a global tour in March, hitting major cities worldwide leading up to the popular MySQL Conference & Expo in April. Every Sun-MySQL community can participate online, …

For a split second, I thought Jonathan said he thought of Sun’s acquisition of MySQL as “hypocritical”. Of course, what he said was “Hippocratical”, in the sense of the old Greek with the oath for doctors: “Do no harm.”

Jonathan appeared in front of the integration team with MySQL and Sun employees here in Menlo Park. What he said was very comfortable to hear for MySQLers old and new:

• Jonathan sees a great strategic fit between MySQL and Sun, and that’s the prime precondition for any good acquisition.
• The strategic fit thinking is seconded by financial analysts and technical observers alike.
• “Honour the community“: Jonathan sees the community of MySQL users as the starting point for all decisions related to the integration.
• “Honour the employees“: Jonathan respects the group of MySQL …

Monday, I’m off to the Sun-MySQL Integration Offsite in Menlo Park. That’s where we’re going to plan the next steps of making MySQL a part of Sun. It’s a three-day offsite, from Tuesday to Thursday, and I’m looking forward to meeting with many new colleagues.

Integrating companies is never easy, and I don’t expect this integration to be trivial, either. But thinking about the many cultural similarities between MySQL and Sun, about our mutual commitment to Open Source, about the positive reception of the acquisition by MySQL employees, and about the positive reception also from the side of Sun, I think we’re in for a great ride and some exciting times, in the best sense of the words.

Sun, here we come!

I spent a couple of hours on Friday at Sun’s office in Finland. It was a visit full of mutual anticipation.

Until the deal is closed, Sun and MySQL are merely planning joint activities, with execution happening once the deal is closed. Already now, lots of touching points were revealed in the informal discussions with Margot Wik, Thomas Branders and their colleagues. It seems both Sun and MySQL have a hard time not going into detail, but such are the rules of the game.

Before Sun Finland’s Friday afternoon coffee, Margot, Thomas and I picked the opportunity to drop by at Teknologföreningen, the Swedish language student corporation at Helsinki University of Technology. That’s the place where I learned to know Margot and Thomas, as well as our CEO Mårten, and many others. And where I “learned” …

Two employees of Sun Finland, Margot Wik (whom I studied French with in the 1980s at the Helsinki University of Technology) and Thomas Branders (another fellow HUT student, from whom I tried to learn how to sing Helan går while having fun at HUT’s Swedish language student corporation Teknologföreningen, but don’t blame him for the end result on YouTube) invited me to Sun Finland’s Friday Coffee Meeting 25.1.2008 at about 14:00. I was happy to accept. It’s only natural to do the inaugural ambassador visit in my native country.

I’m looking forward to learning from Margot, Tomi and their colleagues, and telling them about MySQL!