This time of the year is usually a very busy one, as there are plenty of events and conferences to attend. Just take a look at our calendar of OSS events on the MySQL Forge to see what I mean! Here's a quick summary of the ones that I will attend and speak at until the end of this year:

On November 14-15, I'll attend the openSQL Camp in Portland (OR), USA. I missed the first one that took place in Charlottesville (VA) in 2008, but had a lot of fun organizing the European Edition earlier this year. The upcoming one will be more like an unconference again - the list of …

The MySQL Community Team maintains a calendar to keep track of Open Source events and conferences that might be relevant from a MySQL point of view (either by submitting a talk, sponsoring or attending it). This calendar is now public - you can either look at the HTML version on the MySQL Forge or subscribe to the iCal feed (e.g. using Mozilla Sunbird or Lightning).

Are we missing an event? If you know any other events that should be included in this calendar, please submit your suggestions via this …

The summer break seems to be over and the event season is heating up again! There is a number of conferences and events coming up in the next months — here is a quick summary of the events that I plan to attend.

This Friday I will attend an event here in Hamburg: the "Silpion Sommerfest", organized by Silpion (a local IT solutions provider which is a partner of Sun Microsystems as well). I will be there to network and talk about MySQL.

This coming weekend (2009-09-12/2009-09-13), there will be the PHP Unconference here in Hamburg, Germany . It will consist of two days of Barcamp-style sessions about …

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 …

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 …

The OpenSQL Camp 2009 web site is now ready for business, I've updated various pages and added some more information about the call for papers. I've also set up a Twitter account (no way without one nowadays, right?), which might also play an important role in the voting/rating of talks later on (Giuseppe came up with an interesting proposal for that).

So we're now seeking your input! Let me quote from the web pages directly:

OpenSQL Camp is a free conference of, by, and for the open-source database community of users and developers. The first OpenSQLCamp 2008 took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, …