Lenz Grimmer's blog

On September 18th-21st, the second EuroOSCON will take place in Brussels, Belgium. I probably won't make it to this year's conference, but I really enjoyed the event in Amsterdam last year.

The session grid contains a number of talks related to MySQL:

• John Paul Ashenfelter: Data Warehousing with MySQL
• Peter Zaitsev: High Performance Full Text search for Database Content
• Lars Thalmann: Being a MySQL Developer

In addition to these sessions which are directly related to MySQL, here is a selection of talks that most likely cover it as well:

• Marcel Molina: Ruby on Rails
• Martin von Haller Groenbaek: Workshop on Open Source Licensing for Businesses
• Open Source @ openBC: How, Why, and Where To?
• Jim Purbrick: Open Source And Second Life
• Mårten Mickos: From Europe to USA - Culture's Consequences on Open Source Communities and Businesses

All in all, the conference program looks very promising. I wish I could be there...

Yesterday I sent out the invitations for our third MySQL User Group Meeting in Hamburg, which will take place on Monday, 4th of September (which is the United MySQL Meetup Day). As usual, we will meet at 19:00 in the Chinese Restaurant "Ni Hao" - the food is excellent and we can use a separate room with a video projector there. If you happen to live around Hamburg, Germany and would like to join, please RSVP and join our mailing list!

Currently I am still pondering on the topic of the presentation - I suggested to invite Paul McCullagh to talk about PrimeBase XT, his transactional pluggable storage engine for MySQL. Would you think this is a suitable topic for a user group meeting? Let me know.

Speaking of MySQL User Groups: have you considered establishing one in your area yet? It's actually a lot of fun and MySQL AB will sponsor the meetup.com fees. In particular, I would like to encourage our MySQL Users in India to take initiative - there are more than 300 people interested in meeting other MySQL people in the major Indian cities like Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore and others. Step up and organize a meeting! We have collected some suggestions and hints on how to get you going on the MySQL Forge Wiki. Once you are up and running, make sure to add yourself to the growing list of MySQL User Groups!

Encouraged by this flattering comment, I went through my full collection of SUSE RPMs, picked the ones worth updating to the latest versions and submitted them to my package repository at the openSUSE build service now:

• bchunk 1.2.0 - A CD image format converter from .bin/.cue to .iso/.cdr/.wav.
• kvdr 0.64 - A KDE Front-End for VDR (Video Disk Recorder)
• samefile 2.12 - Find identical files on your file system
• rss-glx 0.8.1 - Really Slick Screensavers
• rzip 2.1 - A large-file compression program

I hope none of these are already maintained somewhere else, this is something I still haven't figured out - how can I search the existing projects for certain packages?

The Build Service totally rocks, especially since it can be conveniently used from the command line as well. I submitted my first two packages via the web frontend, but have now switched to using the osc command line tool exclusively. Kudos to the openSUSE Build Service Team, building packages on other platforms has never been that easy!

Thanks to Duncan Mac-Vicar for the friendly reminder: I finally bit the bullet and started using the openSUSE Build Service for building and hosting the RPMs that I build for SUSE Linux by myself. I've now moved the KeyJnote and mercurial RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.1 to my own repository there. Future RPMs will also be provided from there exclusively. Kudos to the openSUSE team for providing this service!

In addition to our main MySQL Users Conference that took place in April, there will also be two small MySQL Conferences in Europe later this year. There will be presentations about our products and roadmaps as well as sessions about best practices and first-hand customer experiences. You will also get a chance to meet and talk with many MySQLers and share your thoughts and experiences. The conferences will take place in London, UK (Tuesday, October 17th) and in Munich, Germany (Thursday, October 19th). The conference program looks very interesting and there is an early bird discount, if you register before August 31st. So don't hesitate to register soon!

Have you ever been annoyed about the fact that uploading files via the web browser usually lacks any kind of visual feedback how far the upload has progressed already? Well, worry no more - Jan has just added that functionality via mod_uploadprogress to lighty. Now you can use some AJAX magic to display the progress on your web page. Keep up the good work, Jan!

FWIW, I just published RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.1 of KeyJnote 0.8.2 and mercurial 0.9.1 to the 10.1 RPM section. Have fun!

It seems to be a good time for people with experience in managing MySQL servers or developing applications based on MySQL: our MySQL Jobs Forum has plenty of openings. So if you are a seasoned MySQL DBA or developer, make sure to check for opportunities there, if you are considering a career change.

In addition to a proven track record on your MySQL experience, being MySQL certified should give you an extra advantage when you apply. The good thing about this certification? You can study for the exam by taking training courses, or all by yourself. Once you feel ready for the exam, you can head to any of the more than 3,000 Pearson VUE testing centers or any of the other LPI testing centers worldwide and take it there.

Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB, answers a variety of questions about MySQL AB and the MySQL Server on the german "Pro-Linux" news site. Worth a read, if you understand german...

Yesterday I received a sample copy of the "SUSE Linux 10.1 OSS - vorkon" DVD, which was assembled by Nicolaus Millin. While I have not installed it yet (as I by now have a very well running installation of SUSE Linux 10.1 on my laptop), the content of the DVD sounds very promising. In addition to incorporating all the updates that have been published since SUSE Linux 10.1 was released (around 100), this version also includes additional drivers like the 3D graphics drivers from ATI and nVidia, network card drivers like ndiswrapper, madwifi and rt2500 as well as drivers for AVM products and Logitech QuickCams. So the base system should already run very smooth and provides a lot of stuff that one usually has to download and install after the initial installation of SUSE Linux OSS.

But the fun doesn't stop here! Nicolaus also added a number of interesting applications, usually not included in SUSE Linux OSS, such as Adobe Reader 7.0, moneyplex, RealPlayer, FlashPlayer, Cinepaint, FlightGear and several extensions for Mozilla Firefox. He also included many LAMP applications (based on the famous Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack), that have already been preconfigured and are ready to use right after installing the packages! This is where the name "vorkon" comes from - "vorkonfiguriert" means "preconfigured" in German. Some of the LAMP apps included are eGroupware, Gallery2, Joomla!, MediaWiki, nagios, phpBB, Serendipity, Typo3 and several others.

All in all this looks like a well-rounded package - it reminds me a lot of how SUSE Linux used to be when people referred to it as the "everything but the kitchen sink" distribution. Unfortunately it seems as if the legal restrictions of being owned by a US company have caused a lot of the former SUSE benefits to vanish - nowadays one has to hunt for a lot of stuff like drivers and uncrippled applications after the initial installation just as with any other Linux distribution. Thanks to Nicolaus for scratching that itch!

You can purchase SUSE Linux 10.1 "vorkon" via amazon.de - for just 19,95 EUR this is a very attractive product, especially for Linux Newcomers. Give it a try!

We used to maintain a list of MySQL User Groups on the MySQL Developer Zone, which made it a bit inconvenient for new User Groups to get listed there. We've now moved the User Group list and some additional info to the Wiki on MySQL Forge (which also has received a facelift, thanks a lot to Colin and Ronald!). If you know of any other MySQL User Groups not listed there, feel free to add them! We are also looking forward to seeing more helpful hints on how to successfully start and maintain a user group. If you have any suggestions, make sure to include them - thanks!

In case you use Mercurial as your preferred distributed revision control system, an RPM of version 0.9 for SUSE Linux 10.1 is now available from my RPM section. Have fun!

Just stumbled over this article, which might come in handy for our Microsoft Office users out there: "Using Excel to analyze MySQL data" by Jason Gilmore explains how to set up the MySQL Connector/ODBC and connecting to a MySQL database using Microsoft Excel.

If you're a Linux user, this article on NewsForge covers a similar topic, using OpenOffice.org

to connect to a MySQL Server.

Update: Thanks to Guillermo Roditi for pointing out that both links pointed to the same article - now fixed. Sorry about that.

I'd like to chime in with Brian and remind you that the Hamburg MySQL User Group meets tonight, too! I have invited Jan Kneschke to give a talk about "Deadly sins in MySQL" (courtesy of Arjen Lentz) and I will also talk a bit about what's cooking at MySQL since the last time we met (it's been three months!). Looking forward to meeting you tonight - we will again meet at 19:00 in the Chinese restaurant Ni-Hao in Hamburg, Wandsbek.