Sun decided to not go down the route of reviewing and accepting the patches, but are now suggesting - are you sitting down? - running multiple instances on the same hardware.

After a series of tests, we've just conducted the first MySQL University session using a new conferencing system, Dimdim, and I thought I'd let you know how it went.

MySQL University is an educational program for engineers from Sun/MySQL and the MySQL community, Dimdim is the new conferencing system that we hope will be able to replace our old presentation system, and "we" isn't plurale majestatis but rather refers to the guys running the MySQL University program, the Sun Database Group documentation team.

I started the Dimdim session fifteen minutes before the hour, and when the two presenters arrived we did a sound check. Petr and David connected from Sun offices in Prague, Czechia, and California, respectively, and I was on a DSL line in my home office in Berlin, Germany. Sound …

Yesterday, we concluded our third annual “MySQL Kundenkonferenz” in Munich. We had a record number [1] of participants, 255 on the re-count including hosts. I had the pleasure to deliver the welcome speech and to moderate the event. Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed the day and it was my distinct impression that the expectations of the participants were more than met.

The external setting of the conference was Hilton Munich City on Rosenheimerstraße, close to Munich’s culture centre Gasteig — and just one S-Bahn stop away from home for me. Excellent facilities.

The start was delayed slightly due to our high-latency registration process, which prompts us to go …

Have you ever heard about VoiceXML? It's a W3C standart that allows you to build web pages that are accessed by voice! It's very used for services like travel tickets selling, hotel reservation, bank account information and so on. In this post, we'll give you a general view of how to make a basic hotel reservation
application with VoiceXML and how to run it using Glassfish and MySQL.

First of all, for VoiceXML applications, we need a voice gateway. We used the Voxeo, it's free and provides you with phone numbers that you can call for free using Skype. All you need to do is create a free account in Voxeo and register your application by informing it's URL. After registering you'll receive the unique phone number for your application.

We'll assume you already know the basics of VoiceXML syntax for the …

Have you ever heard about VoiceXML? It’s a W3C standart that allows you to build web pages that are accessed by voice! It’s very used for services like travel tickets selling, hotel reservation, bank account information and so on. In this post, we’ll give you a general view of how to make a basic hotel reservation
application with VoiceXML and how to run it using Glassfish and MySQL.

First of all, for VoiceXML applications, we need a voice gateway. We used the Voxeo, it’s free and provides you with phone numbers that you can call for free using Skype. All you need to do is create a free account in Voxeo and register your application by informing it’s URL. After registering you’ll receive the unique phone number for your application.

We’ll assume you already know the basics of VoiceXML syntax for the …

Update to tomorrow's MySQL University session: Petr will start presenting how to use NetBeans for writing PHP. David will continue showing how to use it with MySQL. To set expectations correctly, we've renamed the MySQL University to Working with PHP and MySQL in NetBeans.

Petr Pisl from the NetBeans team will be David Van Couvering's co-presenter for the MySQL University session this Thursday (see the announcement I posted yesterday). While David will focus on NetBeans with MySQL, Petr will demonstrate what NetBeans can do for PHP programmers, a species that uses MySQL all the time. Thanks for joining in, Petr!

In his recent …

The next MySQL University session will take place this Thursday, 23rd October. David Van Couvering will show how to use NetBeans with MySQL.

Note that this session will start at 9:00 Pacific Time (18:00 CET, 17:00 BST).

For this session, we'll use a new presentation system that we hope will make things much easier for both presenters and attendees: Dimdim (www.dimdim.com). If it works out as expected, Dimdim will replace our current presentation system which required attendees to open a browser, connect to an IRC channel on Freenode, and open some fancy URL with a voice streaming application. With Dimdim, all that needs to be done is point your browser to a URL, and that's it. …

As part of an internal programme at Sun, I am a “SEED mentor” for another Sun employee (not a former employee of MySQL, but what we Sun Dolphins call Sun Classics). He is called Alok and lives in Bangalore, and sadly, our schedules crossed so that I couldn’t meet him when I was at our Bangalore offices in July. So I am mentoring someone I’ve met only over phone — but we’re getting along just fine.

Two of the topics we’ve discussed recently are blogging and books. So after hanging up after our 9 CET 12:30 Indian time mentoring session, I got the idea to combine the two: write a blog entry about the books I recommended Alok.

One thing Alok is contemplating at the moment is the degree to which he should spend time on developing his business skills vs his engineering skills. That’s a familiar topic for many of us in …