Travelling to Hongkong and Taipei has made such an impression on me, that I couldn’t help but add two new blogs to my homepage kaj.arno.fi:

• http://blogs.arno.fi/guanxi/ is (or pretends to be) in Simplified Chinese, written on the Chinese mainland
• http://blogs.arno.fi/yilingyi/ is (or pretends to be) in Traditional Chinese, written here in Taiwan

Guanxi means “relations”, as in “Community Relations”. It’s also a very common word describing how to get things done in China. It even has its own English language Wikipedia entry.

Yi-ling-yi means one-oh-one, as in Taipei 101. …

Two down, one to go! Last week, I went to Gothenburg and Stockholm for the Sun Nordic Software Roadshow. This week, it’s Helsinki coming up.

These roadshows are a set of presentations and form an opportunity to interface with Sun customer and partners, and lots of MySQL users. It’s about MySQL, Glassfish, Open ESB, Open SSO and identity management.

For Gothenburg and Stockholm, the first keynoter was Ola Ahlvarsson. He’s a serial entrepreneur that survived the dot com boom and now makes a comfortable living talking common sense about Internet, and hosting the Scandinavian Interactive Media Event ( …

Now being back from last week’s trip to Ukraine and this week’s trip to Russia, it’s time for an overview.

MySQL was prominently present at both Sun events, the one in Kiev on 26.11.2008 and the one in Moscow last Tuesday 2.12.2008. It was good to discuss with local Sun guys, and to meet MySQL community people and colleagues in both places.

The two first pictures in this post are from the community event at a university of economy in Moscow.

Like elsewhere, I started in the local language (which, perhaps surprisingly, frequently seems to be Russian also in Ukraine), followed by a “MySQL in the Web Economy” presentation in English.

Russia and Ukraine are interesting places, so I …

Uruguay is the Switzerland of South America, in many ways: when it comes to bank secrets, to the size of the country, and to the relative cleanliness compared to neighbouring countries. Uruguay has a similar accent to that of Buenos Aires, and a highly developed economy with demanding database users.

Like yesterday in Argentina, I could today be part of the MySQL launch in Uruguay. Following our script from Argentina (meet press, present to customers, meet individual customers), the difference in Uruguay is that we mostly work through partners.

The most prominent Sun partner in Uruguay is Arnaldo C. Castro S.A. They hosted our customer event in hotel Cala di Volpe (Giuseppe told me this Italian name means “Bay of Foxes”, and quite like Argentina, Uruguay has plenty of Italian immigrants). I met with plenty of representatives for …

Señoras y señores, I am happy to have been part of the MySQL launch in Argentina yesterday. Visiting Argentina has been a great opportunity to meet with the MySQL users and not-yet-users in a country with 30 degrees Celsius, with colourful houses in La Boca, with an omnipresent Diego Maradona, and only minor challenges in the form of payment methods when using local transport.

On Monday evening, I visited the Universidad Nacional De La Matanza. Together …

Not everything is going the wrong way on our planet. There are things that are changing for the better! And one of them is South Africa. Just back from a three-day MySQL related trip to Johannesburg and Pretoria, I saw a lot of well-founded hope around me. The hope is related to less crime, less racial tension, and more economic growth. I share the positive vibes and think they’re founded in reality.

I was in South Africa for the yearly Sun partner event in “Sub-Saharan Africa” or SSA for short. SSA is one of the fastest-growing regions within what is known as “Emerging Markets”, which in itself grows faster than Europe, North America or Asia Pacific. And partners are extremely important, as Sun uses solely indirect sales in the region.

I was so impressed by what I saw that I wrote nine blog …

Bom dia!

On Monday and Tuesday this week, a team of MySQLers (”Sun Dolphins”) and Sunnies (”Sun Classics”) launched the commercial presence of MySQL in Brazil.

This means we have now have ambitions well beyond the growth of the MySQL user base in Brazil, which already is in the top five countries of the world when it comes to downloads. In other words,

• we have a senior sales person assigned, with a sales goal for Brazil
• we are recruiting sales engineers for Brazil
• we are recruiting Support Engineers, who will deliver MySQL support in Portuguese
• we are recruiting Consultants, who will deliver MySQL professional services in Portuguese

During the Sun Tech Days in São Paulo, we …

This blog posting has little to do with MySQL or Sun. It’s about experiences gathered while shuttling around the world as MySQL’s Ambassador to Sun, but it’s not about databases, it’s not about operating systems, nor computer languages: it’s about human languages, and how going beyond English provides a business advantage.

Let me try to grab your attention by first sharing my perhaps somewhat controversial conclusion:

English as a language of communication is much overrated. In an international setting, English may be sufficient for conveying meaning, but it has severe deficiencies when it comes to establishing a social relationship, to showing respect, to building trust, and to having fun.

For many years, I have attempted at learning how to say “thank you” and “please don’t smoke” and “where is …

Since meeting yesterday with Vladimir Voskresensky, a Sun colleague from St Petersburg, I have a new favourite answer to the request “so tell me an example of technical advantages resulting from Sun’s acquisition of MySQL“:

Using NetBeans as an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for coding and learning MySQL.

Now, that’s a simple answer, and that’s because it’s a simple and beautiful thought. But let’s start from the beginning.

In my days as a coder, I enjoyed the command line. I’ve used various coding editors, and I’ve disliked the hassle of learning new IDEs, who sometimes are more of a straightjacket than a productivity enabler. So call me conservative if you will, but …

“Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to this presentation regarding the acquisition of the company MySQL AB by Sun Microsystems.”

Since my speech on Sun / MySQL integration for about 400 people in Beijing last week, I have been asked a few times about what it’s like to give a speech in Chinese. Well, I wouldn’t really know, as all I did was read aloud a text for 8 minutes. I remembered what passage was about what topic, and I had noted which words to stress, when to raise my hand etc. But of the actual words, I understood perhaps 5-10 % (based on them being repeated often enough). So I know I am a fuzongcai (Vice President) with Sun Microsystems, I know the difference between a kèhù (customer) and a yònghù (user). I live …