Lenz Grimmer's blog

In two weeks from now, the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007 will take place in Santa Clara, California. Our team has been very busy with working with the conference management team from O'Reilly to prepare for this event, especially Jay who is in charge of organizing and arranging the more than 110 sessions that will be held in several parallel tracks. The conference program looks very exciting, I am impressed by the wide range of topics and quality of speakers that we have lined up.

In addition to the presentations and tutorials, there will also be an Expo, where partner companies will exhibit their products related to MySQL. You will notice a number of well-known names in the industry there, e.g. hardware vendors like Dell, Dolphin Interconnect, HP or Sun as well as software companies like Alfresco, BitRock, Google, Pentaho, Red Hat and many more.

One of my tasks for this conference is to arrange the DotOrg Pavilion, an exhibition area inside the expo hall that is reserved for Open Source Community projects that are based on or support MySQL in some way. The conference web page does not yet list them all, therefore I'd like to give you a full rundown of all the OSS projects that will be present there:

• Bugzilla is an open source bug tracker used by thousands of businesses to track defects and enhancements. Bugzilla, the standard in open source bug tracking, is a versatile and powerful web based system with a minimal footprint, proven to support groups of any size from small projects to multinational enterprises.
• dotProject is a Web-based project management framework that includes modules for companies, projects, tasks (with Gantt charts), forums, files, a calendar, contacts, tickets/helpdesk, multi-language support, user/module permissions, and themes. It is translated into 17 languages and has a modular design that allows extra modules (such as time sheets and inventory) to be added in easily.
• Drupal is a powerful, scalable and full-featured content management system that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize content and run an online community. Tens of thousands of people and organizations use Drupal to power scores of different web sites. A large, healthy and diverse community of developers, users and consultants drives a rapid pace of innovation and a wide variety of feature development.
• Eventum is user friendly and extensible issue tracking software from MySQL that can be used by a support department to track incoming technical support requests, a software development team to quickly organize tasks and bugs or anyone else looking to organize their work.
• HeidiSQL is an easy-to-use interface for developers using MySQL, allowing simple management of their databases and tables. Previously known as MySQL-Front, the name has been switched in 2006 by Ansgar Becker, the first developer, that put his old sources into a new open source project at SourceForge. Currently this tool is available on Windows and Linux.
• Joomla! is one of the most outstanding content management systems in the world. This is not only because of his approach of providing one of the most well structured and simple user interfaces for managing your media, text, image and other public information materials in the web. With Joomla! you are able to provide a huge information base for your professional audience as simple as you build up your own family community website. The new refactored content framework gives you the confidence that your site is based on a reliable, flexible, future proven and easy to manage plattform.
• LinuxQuestions.org is a free, friendly and active Linux Community with over 180,000 members and over 1,7000,000 posts. Founded in 2000 LQ offers forums, reviews, a Linux hardware compatibility list, a Linux knowledge base in wiki format, Linux tutorials, a free Linux download site, a Linux podcast, a Linux radio show and more. LQ has forums for everything from Linux Newbies to Linux in the Enterprise and has over 20 officially recognized Linux distribution forums.
• OTRS is an Open source Ticket Request System (also well known as trouble ticket system) with many features to manage customer telephone calls and e-mails. The system is built to allow your support, sales, pre-sales, billing, internal IT, helpdesk, etc. department to react quickly to inbound inquiries. Do you receive many e-mails and want to answer them with a team of agents? You're going to love the OTRS!
• Phorum, is the original PHP/MySQL message board software. Started in 1997 by Brian Moon, Phorum has been used by sites such as Zend.com and currently is the message board of choice for MySQL.com. Phorum's developers focus on speed and expandability through its flexible module system.
• phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web. Currently it can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields, manage privileges,export data into various formats and is available in 50 languages.
• SnapLogic is an Open Source project that enables developers to easily and rapidly integrate applications and other data sources through a Data Integration Network. SnapLogic embraces the simplicity and scalability of the Web to collapse the complexity of data integration for Internet-scale integration.
• Sphinx is fast and powerful full text search engine designed with indexing database content in mind. It offers high performance, good scalability (with multi-server distributed searching), great search quality, and other advanced features such as efficient filtering, sorting and grouping. Both native search APIs and a Pluggable MySQL Storage Engine search client are available, which makes Sphinx easy to integrate into existing applications.
• WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.
• XAMPP is a free software package containing the Apache web server, MySQL database and necessary tools to use the PHP and Perl programming languages. Currently, XAMPP is available for Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X (the X in its name could stand for any one of these operating systems).

I hope I have gathered an interesting mix of projects and look forward to meeting with these people in person soon! If you attend the conference, please make sure to stop by the DotOrg pavilion and have a chat with the representatives from these projects!