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 must be awake for about 24 hours now, things are getting a bit blurry. But I have arrived at our MySQL Staff Meeting here in Orlando safely! My flight with Northwest airlines from Frankfurt via Detroit was uneventful - the plane was pretty empty so I was happy to have two seats for myself! The board entertainment program was neat, I really prefer video on demand over scheduled movie broadcasts (I watched "The Nanny Diaries", which was quite funny, and "The Fantastic Four", which had some nice CG effects).

While standing in the immigration line in Detroit somebody in the line next to us waved to me - it was Tobias "Flupps" Asplund, one of our trainers! Quite a funny coincidence, he just had arrived via Amsterdam. We actually were on the same flight from Detroit …

While some colleagues have already arrived in Orlando to meet fellow MySQLers, my plane from FRA to MCO (via DTW) does not leave until 10:20am tomorrow. Currently I am staying at my parents' place in Heidelberg, from which I will be picked up by an airport shuttle service early tomorrow morning (5:40am, ugh!).

I am looking forward to meeting with the other members of my team as well as old and new colleagues from the different departments. There seems to be some kind of outdoor team building event taking place on Wednesday afternoon - we have been split up into mixed groups and were asked to bring comfortable clothes and a light sweater or jacket. I hope I am not too jetlagged by the end of the day...

This will be my fourth MySQL staff meeting - when I joined the company in 2002, I was lucky to attend the third staff meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia right during the first week when I started my new job. Back then, we …

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 …

Hmm, long time no post! But I have the perfect excuse: I've actually been on vacation the past two weeks... Now I am back at work and busy trying to make a dent in the mail pile that has accumulated while I was gone. In addition to that, I am assisting with the organization of our MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg, which will take place in September. See Kaj's blog post for more details about it. I am in charge of our community guests and really look forward to meeting most of our internal developers as well as community guests there! This is going to be a fun event.

In addition to that, I am applying the final touches to my upcoming presentation about our ongoing community activities: "Opening the doors (and windows) of the Cathedral", which will be held at the …

Just a quick reminder for those of you located near Hamburg, Germany: on Monday, June 4th at 19:00 there will be our 7th MySQL Meetup. As usual, we will gather at the Chinese Restaurant "Ni Hao". This time, Sönke Ruempler will give a talk about the PHP-ORM-Framework "Propel". If you'd like to join, don't hesitate to RSVP via meetup.com or Xing.com right away! Thanks - see you there!

Even though MySQL is used to power a lot of web sites and applications that handle large binary objects (BLOBs) like images, videos or audio files, these objects are usually not stored in MySQL tables directly today. The reason for that is that the MySQL Client/Server protocol applies certain restrictions on the size of objects that can be returned and that the overall performance is not acceptable, as the current MySQL storage engines have not really been optimized to properly handle large numbers of BLOBs. To work around these limitations, these projects usually just store a reference to the object (e.g. a path name in a regular file system). This approach works around the limitations applied by the MySQL Server, but results in a disconnection and potential source of inconsistency between the database and the file system content. There was an interesting discussion about that topic on Sheeri's …

It's time for another Meetup of the Hamburg MySQL User Group! As for previous events, we'll meet on Monday, 2nd of April at 19:00 in the Chinese restaurant Ni Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek.

This time there will be a presentation about "Xing/OpenBC growing pains", held by Erick Dennis und Michael Otto from epublica, the company behind Xing.com.

The talk will be held in english and is a rehearsal for their presentation at our upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo, which will take place from April 23rd-26th in Santa Clara, California. Please subscribe to our …

I just learned from my colleagues in our Dublin office that Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB will be visiting them this coming weekend. They would like to take this opportunity to arrange a MySQL User Group Meeting, which will take place on Saturday, 27th of January, 18:00 o'clock in their offices:

MySQL Ireland,
Ground Floor, Misys Building,
Eastpoint Business Park,
Dublin 3
Ireland

This is your chance to meet and talk with Mårten and other MySQLers. There will also be free food and drinks and most likely a tech talk about MySQL (details will follow). So if you are located somewhere around Dublin, make sure to attend this event!

I've already sent out the invitation and announcements to various channels, but let me repeat it once more: the 5th Hamburg MySQL User Group Meetup is coming up on Monday, 5th of Februrary. So far, 15 people have already RSVPed, so it's going to be a fun evening again. If you have not done so yet, please register via meetup.com or Xing soon! I will give a 15 minute lightning talk about "What's new at MySQL AB", but we're still looking for another MySQL-related talk. If you want to share your experiences with MySQL or talk about a certain application or tool that has a relation to MySQL, please let me know! As usual, we'll meet a 19:00 at the Chinese Restaurant "Ni Hao", …