I've been informed about two upcoming events/conferences that are organized by the independent Oracle user groups of the respective countries. If you're nearby, how about submitting a talk about a MySQL-related topic?
On March 29, 2011 the the Oracle Benelux User Group will have their yearly OBUG Benelux Connect 2011 conference, which will take place in Brussels, Belgium. You can submit your proposal until December 3rd, 2010 via this link.
On May 19th and 20th, 2011, the Oracle User Group Finland together with the Oracle User Groups of Estonia, Latvia and Russia will organize the EMEA Harmony 2011 Spring conference, which will take place in Helsinki, Finland. The Call for Papers has been opened — you can submit your speaking proposals until February 1st, 2011 via this submission form.
And while we're at it: the MySQL Developer room at FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels is still seeking for more talk proposals, too! Please consider submitting your suggested talk until Sunday, 26th of December, 2010
Analog zu den vorherigen kostenlosen Seminaren zum Thema "MySQL Hochverfügbarkeit" im Oktober wird es auch in diesem Monat wieder zwei Termine geben:
Behandelt werden unter anderem MySQL-Replikation, MySQL Cluster und ein Ausblick auf MySQL 5.5. Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos, eine frühzeitige Reservierung ist daher empfohlen. Weitere Informationen gibt es auf der
Veranstaltungs-Seite.
Am 5.+6. Februar 2011 findet in Brüssel die "Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting" (FOSDEM) - Konferenz statt. Auch im nächsten Jahr wird es wieder einen "Developer Room" zum Thema MySQL geben. Unter dem Motto "MySQL & Friends" möchten wir ein umfangreiches Programm an Vorträgen rund um den MySQL Server zusammenstellen, mit dem wir Entwickler und MySQL-Administratoren gleichermaßen ansprechen wollen.
Jeder Vortrag wird 20 Minuten dauern (plus 5 Minuten Q&A). Es sind insgesamt 12 Slots zu vergeben. Der Call for Papers ist bereits eröffnet - Vorschläge für Vorträge (in englischer Sprache) können bis Sonntag, 26. Dezember hier eingereicht werden.
Weitere Informationen gibt es auf dem MySQL Forge Wiki und dem englischen Call for Papers.
Ich freue mich auf Eure Themenvorschläge!
It's that time of the year again — the nice folks at FOSDEM have granted us a developer room at their upcoming conference (February 5+6 2011 in Brussels, Belgium)!
As usual there were more applications than they were able to accommodate, so we are very grateful for this opportunity for collaboration. Titled "MySQL and Friends", our room next year will be H.2213 with a capacity of 100 seats. It will be at our disposal on Saturday 5th, from 13:00 till 19:00. Like last year, we would like to set up a schedule of talks related to the MySQL server and the various projects that surround it. Each talk will last 20 minutes, plus 5 minutes of Q&A and a 5 minute break for switching speakers, giving us 12 slots in total to fill with excellent tech talks. Take a look at this year's schedule for some examples! I hope we can assemble an even more exciting and interesting schedule for next year.
Quoting from my last year's call for papers:
We are looking for covering a wide range of topics that attract both MySQL DBAs as well as application developers that work with MySQL as their database of choice. Are you developing a new storage engine or other plugin? Do you want to share your experiences and best practices in administering or deploying MySQL servers? Did you develop a new method to scale a MySQL setup? Let us and the audience know about it! You can submit your talk proposal via this submission form.
The deadline for turning in your proposal is Sunday, 26th of December, 2010, after which there will be a voting and rating period to identify the most interesting and attractive topics.
Please check the FOSDEM 2011 information page on the MySQL Forge Wiki for more details and don't hesitate to contact me directly, if you have any questions or suggestions. I look forward to your proposals!
The UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) is an independent non-profit organisation of users of Oracle products in the UK, which organizes over 80 events per year all across the UK and Ireland. They have more that 15.000 members and were established over 25 years ago. Currently, they are in the final stretch of the preparations for their annual Technology & E-Business Conference, which will take place from November, 29th - December, 1st in Birmingham (UK).
For the first time, the conference will host a dedicated stream of presentations related to MySQL, which is scheduled for Wednesday (Dec. 1st). Targeted at database administrators, developers as well as users new to MySQL, there will be presentations from well-known speakers and participants of the MySQL community as well as members of the MySQL Team at Oracle.
Attendees will learn about best practices and gain valuable insight into the MySQL Server and related applications and tools.
Highlights include a keynote about the Oracle strategy and plans for MySQL by Richard Mason, Vice President of MySQL Sales and Consulting at Oracle, talks about High Availability with MySQL and MySQL Cluster as well as InnoDB Performance Tuning best practices. Other sessions will cover related products and projects from the MySQL ecosystem, that help to make the most of MySQL. See the full agenda on the conference web site for details and speaker information.
Registration for the event is still open. Get your tickets now!
Over the weekend I updated my Drupal 7 test appliance in SUSE Studio to the Drupal 7.0-beta2 release, which was released on Oct. 23rd. I also added phpMyAdmin upon a user request, to provide a web-based method to work with the MySQL instance, if needed.
In addition to the lightweight "headless" appliance (which can only be accessed and configured via a remote network connection), I've now also created a GUI-based version. This appliance starts a minimal GNOME desktop and a Mozilla Firefox browser, which in turn opens the Drupal installation page by default. I hope you will find this useful if you want to toy around and test Drupal 7 without having to go through the entire OS and LAMP stack configuration yourself. In fact, you can even test this appliance via the recently added test drive option from right out of your web browser!
The appliance is now also available in OVF format. SuSE Studio now also builds Amazon EC2 images, which don't seem to be available for download from the SUSE Gallery yet. I assume this is a recent addition to the continuously improving SUSE Studio functionality, hopefully these images will be made available soon.
Heute hat mir der Postbote Post aus Österreich gebracht: Michael Prokop vom GRML-Projekt war so freundlich, mit ein Exemplar seines Buches "Open Source Projektmanagement" (Open Source Press) zu schicken, das im September dieses Jahres auf den Markt kam. Sogar mit Widmung - vielen Dank dafür!
Ich zitiere einfach mal aus der Beschreibung des Verlags:
Die Unterschiede bei der Entwicklung von Open-Source- und Closed-Source-Software gehen weit über Fragen der Lizenzierung hinaus. Wer ein freies Projekt startet, sollte die ganz eigenen Regeln kennen, um nicht Motivation und Arbeit aller Beteiligten zu gefährden. Das heißt zugleich: Wer die besondere Dynamik bei der Entwicklung freier Software zu nutzen weiß, wird von den technischen Ergebnissen und der besonderen Atmosphäre gemeinschaftlicher Arbeit immer begeistert.
Michael Prokop, Initiator und Leiter des erfolgreichen "Grml"-Projekts, schöpft aus der Erfahrung, wenn er die vielfältigen Aspekte freier und zugleich professioneller Entwicklungsarbeit beschreibt: soziale Belange der Teambildung und Motivation, technische Hilfsmittel der Kommunikation und Code-Entwicklung, aber auch ganz praktische Fragen der Finanzierung, des Marketings und der Dokumentation.
Wer neue Impulse für seine Mitarbeit bei freien Projekten sucht oder als Entwickler kommerzieller Produkte Einblick in den Open-Source-Kosmos nehmen möchte, findet in diesem Buch eine wertvolle Quelle.
Unter der Adresse http://release-it.org/ findet sich die Website zum Buch. Das Inhaltsverzeichnis liest sich vielversprechend – ich hoffe ich habe bald Gelegenheit dazu, mir das Buch zu Gemüte zu führen.
Die Kapitel sind mit Berichten aus der Praxis und Exkursen externer Autoren angereichert und ich konnte einige bekannte Namen unter den Beteiligten ausmachen. Es war mir eine Freude und Ehre, zum Kapitel 4.1 "Team - Arbeitsformen in der Softwareentwicklung" einen Exkurs über das Arbeiten in einer virtuellen Firma am Beispiel von MySQL beisteuern zu dürfen. Zum Thema "Community Management" hat Alexandra Leisse von Nokia/Qt einen interessanten Exkurs geschrieben, dem ich voll und ganz zustimme 
The Drupal community just recently released another alpha test release of their upcoming Drupal 7 version, to shake out the remaining bugs and to encourage more users to test it.
If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the SQL mode and InnoDB mode. Using this configuration helps to ensure that Drupal works well with the current version of MySQL/InnoDB and does not use any "questionable" SQL statements. This might be especially interesting for additional modules - Drupal core did not reveal any problems using strict mode so far.
You can download disk images for VMware/Virtualbox/KVM or XEN from the SUSE Gallery (free login required). Just boot the appliance in your virtualization application of choice, choose your keyboard layout and step through the network configuration and Time Zone selection. Once the appliance has booted up and the login: prompt appeared, point your web browser to the appliance's IP address to start the Drupal installation/configuration. MySQL has been pre-configured, there is an empty database named "drupal" and a user "drupal" with the same password to access it. You just need to enter this information in the Drupal Database configuration dialogue during the installation. Anything else can be configured to your liking.
After you have finished the installation, you can toy around with a fresh Drupal 7 installation! Install additional modules, change the themes, add content. And make sure to report all bugs that you run into while doing so! Have fun.
Das verspricht interessant zu werden: im Oktober werden wir zwei eintägige Seminare zum Thema "MySQL-Hochverfügbarkeit" veranstalten, bei denen die verschiedenen MySQL Hochverfügbarkeits-Technologien und -Architekturen vorgestellt werden. Aus der Beschreibung:
Wir werden Anwendungsfälle und optimale Verfahrensweisen für die Implementierung der MySQL Replikation, von MySQL Cluster und anderen Hochverfügbarkeits-Technologien betrachten. Im Rahmen dieses Seminars erfahren Sie außerdem, wie diese Technologien grundlegend funktionieren und kombiniert werden können, um besser skalierbare und hochverfügbare Datenbankinfrastrukturen zu erstellen.
Das erste Seminar findet am 5. Oktober in Heimstetten bei München statt, am 27. Oktober wird es eine ähnliche Veranstaltung in Langen bei Frankfurt geben.
Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos - daher empfehle ich, sich früh für die Teilnahme anzumelden! Weitere Informationen findet man hier.
