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MySQL Boxers

What could be more of an incentive to attend the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara next week than to know that you could get a pair of genuine MySQL boxer shorts?   They have the official "freedom to work anywhere" motto on them, because, well, if you're working at home, you may as well work in your boxers.  (This is not recommended for those who work in an office.)

This past weekend I was in Utah for the first ever Open Source Goat Rodeo (OSGR) gathering organized by rabid open source ski-cowboy and pie-maker extraordinaire Matt Asay.  I'm not sure why, but I got everyone to put the boxers on their head for a group photo.  From left to right, Matt Asay (Alfresco), Marc Fleury (JBoss founder), John Robb (Zimbra), Fabrizio Copobianco (Funambol), Larry Augustin (open source investor), Lon Johnston (PageOne), Ross Mason (Mulesource), myself and Bryce Roberts (O'Reilly Alpha Tech Venture).  Richard Daley (Pentaho) and Jeff Borek (IBM) had the good sense to not join us for pie and boxers.  Amazingly enough, no alcohol was involved.

The Open Source Goat Rodeo was an interesting "un-conference."  Perhaps a bit unstructured for my taste in that there's no formal agenda or presentations, just lots of good discussions, whether over lunch, beer, or on the ski slopes.   I hope we will make it an annual event but continue to keep it very small and informal.  Thanks to Matt for organizing the event and for bringing the pie.   

BTW, there is still time to register in advance for the MySQL conference and avoid the "on site" charge.  But some tutorials are now sold out.   But you can still vote for what you're most looking forward to at the conference. 

• MySQL: Conference, Job openings, QuickPoll
• Open Source Goat Rodeo: Video, Photos

 

Danger: St Patrick's Day Drunk Dial Competition

Ever thought about dialing someone when you're three-sheets-to-the-wind to let them know how you really feel?  Now instead of calling your ex, your boss or your soon to be ex-boss, all-star MySQL web developer Dups has created the St Patrick's Day Drunk Dial phone line.  Now your innermost drunken thoughts are safe and stored with millions of web listeners around the world.

I tested out the service after a few celebratory MySQL vodka shots and it works as advertised. I just hope I don't win.  Otherwise I'll have to call back and beg to be disqualified.  It's a great service to society, but I can't help but wonder: What about the other 51 weeks of the year?

Check it out.  I'm sure this is powered by open source.  But remember, not every web site is gonna win MySQL Application of the year at the MySQL Conference.  But who knows, this one might.  Particularly if you call today: +1-317-644-6963 (normal long distance charges to US may apply.)

• St Pat's Drunk Dial: Home, History, Rules, FAQ
• News coverage: Laptop Magazine, Gizmodo

MySQL & Sun Community Town Hall

We did a community townhall video session earlier this week with Jonathan Schwartz, Rich Green and myself.  You can view it online at http://ustream.tv/sun and at YouTube.  This is a pretty high-level discussion, but we responded to some questions that came in from the live chat about platforms, languages, patents, how Sun makes money from MySQL etc.  I was also hoping to resolve once and for all what remains one of the hot developer issues: vi vs emacs.  And in keeping with the MySQL tradition, we had a vodka toast at the end.

There were also more technical IRC sessions led by Kaj Arno and Ian Murdock this week and we'll be kicking off a worldtour mashup visiting many cities around the world and toasting to the MySQL community and wrapping up at the MySQL Conference & Expo April 14-17 in Santa Clara. You can find out more info at www.sun.com/mysqltour. 

I'll be in Austin Sunday March 9 for an event that's sponsored by Sun at La Zona Rosa 9pm featuring live performances by The Smithereens and Seven Mary Three.  I hope to see many MySQL users there!

 

MySQL World Tour

We had a little champaign toast in our exec staff meeting when the news came across that Sun's acquisition of MySQL was complete.  Congratulations to all the MySQL and Sun employees who went the extra mile to make this happen in record time.  I especially appreciate the efforts that Sun's legal staff has gone to in order to accomodate the open source philosophy of MySQL.  While there are still a few details to work out, I am very pleased with all of our integration work.  It will be an exciting time and there's great opportunity for MySQL to continue to grow inside of Sun.  We also had a toast to Marten Mickos our CEO who is unfailingly humble and deserves everyone's thanks for building MySQL into such a successful company. 

Note that Sun is very clear that we will continue to support all major platforms and languages, so if you're using MySQL on Linux, Windows, Solaris or with Java, PHP, Perl, VB, C, Java or Ruby on Rails or any of our existing platforms and languages, you're in good hands.  No only that, we get additional technical resources from Sun to help out in key areas.  As Jonathan Schwartz, top dog at Sun said in his letter to the MySQL community:

"For our worldwide developers, Sun working with the MySQL community will more quickly take the MySQL database to the next level of scalability and performance by tapping into Sun's $14 billion in expertise, technologies and global support. Bottom line, Sun is putting a billion dollars behind the "M" in LAMP, increasing our already-strong commitment to open source communities, to deliver a more powerful Web application development platform. And we assure you, MySQL will remain just as open, fast, free, easy-to-use and innovative as you've always seen. And much more.

"Additionally, this arrangement does not change Sun's long-standing relationship with Oracle and Sybase in the marketplace. Just as Sun supports customer choice of platform through AMD, Intel and SPARC, customers will have a choice of database systems for use with Sun's platform offerings."

After our meeting it was back to business, we've started planning an upcoming world tour where we'll also toast all our users and customers around the world.  We'll be visiting lots of cities in the US and hosting a worldwide mashup tour. 

There will also be more announcements at the MySQL Conference & Expo April 14-17 in Santa Clara.  (BTW, you can use the Sun discount code mys08sun to save 10% off the registration fee.  I recommend registering soon before the tutorials sell out.)

• MySQL: letter from Marten Mickos, Rich Green, Conference
• Sun: Mashup tour, Jonathan's blog, letter from Jonathan

Olli Toivainen on Nokia N Series

On my InfoWorld blog I've posted an interview with Olli Toivainen, Nokia's director of product management.  He's one of the unsung heroes behind the N Series of Linux-based Internet Tablets.  Although I couldn't get him to make any new announcements of future products, he does give quite a bit of good info around the N810 Internet tablet, which I think is one of the coolest devices out there.

For those interested in music, I've also posted an interview with Joe Trohman from Fall Out Boy over at www.guitarvibe.com .  Oddly enough, he didn't have much to say about Internet tablets, open source or Linux.  But he sure had a lot to say about guitars!

• InfoWorld: Open Sources
• Amazon: Nokia N810

Test Automation Bootcamp Feb 26-28

SuperDBA and SOA guru Robert Schneider over at PushToTest is putting on a 3-day test automation bootcamp in Silicon Valley Feb 26-28.  It's a hands-on session with laptop required.

The role of testing and testing tools has evolved in recent years from simple record / playback tools (e.g. GUI monkey tools) to more sophisticated approaches that leverage a web services model with dynamic data. New technologies like soapUI, Selenium, and PushToTest, have been designed for Web app, Web services and Ajax testing. Pulling these tools and platforms together into something that the average database developer or tester can use can requires quite a bit of effort and ramp time.  A bootcamp can be a great way to get a jumpstart on the process. 

• PushToTest: Test Automation Bootcamp
• Amazon: MySQL Database Design & Tuning

MySQL Conference Early Reg Deadline

We're heading into February and that means there's only a few weeks left until the MySQL Conference & Expo early registration expires.  This year's conference promises to be our biggest and best ever.  I suspect that a lot of the hot tutorials on performance tuning and new features will sell out early.  There will be sessions on our various storage engines including InnoDB, Cluster, Falcon and Maria -- a new "MyISAM with Crash Recovery" engine that Monty and several other long-time MySQLers have been working on.  There will also be tons of BOF sessions going late into the evenings, and some great keynotes.  Heck, I think we can get Jonathan Schwartz up on stage this year!

• MySQL Conference: Main site, Sessions, Tutorials, Speakers, Registration, Exhibitors

Photos from Orlando

Here are a few photos from our announcement in Orlando earlier this week.  It's been crazy busy, but the response has generally been very positive from our community, our customers and our employees. 

It's been fun to have some pretty cool Sun folks at our company meeting in Orlando including Rich Green, James Gosling, Ian Murdock, Bill Shannon, Karen Padir, Rich Lang, Dave Douglas, Eduardo Pelegrillo and others. (Also, thanks to Tobias for the photo of the long-haired guy playing RockBand at our party Wednesday night.) 

No doubt there will be a few gotchas here and there as we work out integration details, but I'm stoked.  Tired, but stoked. 

Helan går in Orlando

The above is a YouTube clip of Kaj Arnö leading MySQL and Sun executives in a rendition of  "Helan går" the official Swedish drinking song at MySQL.  This was followed by 400 shots of vodka being downed in unison. 

Sun + MySQL = Awesome

Today we have 400 some MySQL employees gathered in Orlando for our all-company meeting that kicks off separate departmental meetings for Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Services etc. Although we've routinely had all-engineering meetings and sales kickoffs every year, this is the first time in a couple of years we've gathered the entire company.

There's a tradition at these big meetings that there's always some kind of surprise. Could be a boat cruise along the Neckar river, or an offsite eco adventure in the Mexican jungle (food poisoning optional) or a trip to a local sauna.

This year I think we managed to surprise everyone with the news that Sun has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL.

Overnight, MySQL goes from being a small (but rapidly growing) company to being part of the Fortune 500. And with Marten Mickos at the helm inside of Sun, we can continue to stay the course delivering the world's most popular open source database. And with Sun, we will have more resources at our disposal to support users and customers worldwide. We will of course continue to support all our major platforms and languages. So if you're using MySQL on Linux, Windows, Mac OS/X or with PHP, Perl, Python, C#, C++, Ruby on Rails or something else, we will continue to provide top notch quality. If you're on Solaris or using GlassFish, NetBeans, Java, DTrace we'll probably come up with some pretty cool ideas in the coming months. Maybe you have ideas on how we can integrate? Let us know!

Will there be changes? Sure. No doubt we'll find ourselves integrating into internal systems and processes at Sun that we don't yet know about. But this opportunity gives us the ability to provide an even bigger impact in the industry. To me that's very exciting. The management team and the founders are all on board to and fully support the acquisition.  And I'm personally looking forward to being part of Sun.

In the coming days and weeks we'll be updating people to answer questions the best we can. It will take a while to fully integrate the companies and that can only happen once the acquisition is officially closed pending customary government anti-trust review. But it's going to be a heckuva exciting time.

It's been a pretty harried few weeks for those working behind the scenes to make this happen, but I think the outcome is pretty amazing. Marten, Jonathan, congratulations on putting together the biggest open source deal in history!

• MySQL: News, Developer Zone, User Conference
• Sun: OpenSolaris, GlassFish, NetBeans, Java, DTrace