This past week I was out in the Bay Area for the MySQL Conference and Expo.  I hit the pre-event parties and attended the conference's opening day.   The first day featured a great set of opening keynotes from Marten Mickos, Jonathan Schwartz and Werner Vogel, CTO of Amazon. 

Marten Mickos, tellin' like it is. 

 
Jonathan Schwartz divulging Sun's "secret plot." 

The main reason for my attendance at the Conference was to get a bunch of podcast interviews as well as to be interviewed by the press as Sun's "Linux Guy."  I ended talking to the Register, Information Week and DevX as an interviewee. 

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I got into San Jose last night around 4:00, picked up my rental car and headed over to the annual pre-conference party at Marten Mickos' house.  The food was amazing and it was great to finally meet the MySQL crowd in person.

It wasn't long however before I was invited by the MySQL Community Team to join them as they headed to the next event on the social calendar.   Armed with a garbage bag full of stuffed dolphins we headed over to Pedro's and the …

As I mentioned a couple of entries ago, last weekend I was in Boston to attend the Free Software Foundation's annual members  meeting. 

It kicked off early Saturday morning amidst a flurry of wet snow.

It was 95 degrees in Austin on this day. 

The event was a day long affair held on the MIT campus and featured a dinner that evening at the Middle East.

 
The crowd mills about waiting for the event to start.  There was a very impressive buffet of fruit, juice, danishes etc to get things started right  -- Can't talk Free Software on an empty stomach.

Matt and Josh campaign to eliminate both DRM and yellow …

I’m still working up some good tips and advice on MySQL on Solaris (particularly the T1000, the new x86 based servers like the X4150 and ZFS, amongst other things), but until then I found Getting Best out of MySQL on Solaris while doing some research.

With the latest OpenSolaris builds (b79, from memory) we now have MySQL built-in, and I worked with the folks on the OpenSolaris Database team to get some reasonable configurations and defaults into the system. MySQL 5.1 and 64-bit support is currently going through the process and will be a in future build.

I’ve also been working with the DTrace people to improve the DTrace support we have in MySQL (documentation will go live this week, I hope). MySQL 6.0.4 will have some basic DTrace probes built-in, but I’ve proposed a patch to extend and improve on …

A recent article at CNN talks about how MySQL operates.

As one of the MySQL team, I can attest that works, but it requires a significant amount of coordination, and lots of online communication through email, IRC, Skype and other methods to keep everbody talking and all the projects working together.

The flip side to that process is that we all get involved in different areas, and you tend to be much more aware of what is going on company wide. There is also better cooperation - because we can all get involved we can all provide our experience and expertise to a wide range of problems and projects. Also, because we come from such a wide range of backgrounds and environments, we have a much wider perspective.

So not only does remote, and earth-wide staffing work, but it provides us with a level of cooperation …