Lenz Grimmer's blog

FedEx rang on my door today, delivering a large cardboard box. The Sender? Sun Microsystems, my new employer!

Upon opening it, I discovered the following:

Since almost a year now, we host a weekly training session for our engineers on Thursday (14:00 UTC winter time), coined the "MySQL University". While it's primary purpose is to share and distribute knowledge about a wide variety of topics relevant to our own developers, many of the sessions are of general interest for developers on other projects as well.

Therefore we hold this sessions in the public and everybody is welcome to attend! You can listen to the presentation via an OGG Audio stream, questions can be posted via IRC on the #mysql-university channel on freenode.net. The audio file and IRC log will be saved, so you can also listen to past university sessions at a later point in time again.

Tomorrow's session will be about using the Valgrind memory checker, held by Stewart Smith, a colleague from Australia who is a member of the MySQL Cluster development team.

The next upcoming sessions include topics more closely related to MySQL Server development:

• February 28: New Optimizer Features in MySQL 6.0 (Sergey Petrunia)
• March 6: How to Add a Collation (Alexander Barkov)
• March 13: Checking Threading and Locking With Helgrind (Stewart Smith)
• March 20: Building MySQL Client Applications (Hartmut Holzgraefe)

See the MySQL University page on the MySQL Forge Wiki for more details and follow the instructions for attendees to get connected.

I recently received a review copy of the book "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing) and finished reading it a few days ago.

The subtitle "A fast and practical guide" is a matching description - I managed to read the ~130 pages over the course of a week. The book is by no means an exhaustive reference manual, but it gives the reader a good overview about Xen and assists with performing the first steps and getting started.

IBM plans a residency to write a Redbook about the IBM DB2 for i5/OS as a Database Engine for MySQL:

Seize this opportunity to be among the first, elite IBM System i professionals worldwide to gain hands-on and practical experience with the MySQL on i5/OS. Working alongside and exchanging knowledge with some of the top database experts in the System i, you will develop a competitive edge that will serve you well in successful service delivery to System i clients. MySQL is used extensively with opensource PHP applications. As our customers deploy PHP web applications, many of them are looking to run MySQL as well.

The residency will take place in Rochester, MN from April 21st to May 16th. This book is going to be a nice followup to the first Redbook titled "Discovering MySQL on IBM i5/OS", which was finished in December last year. If you are curious to learn how to install MySQL on this platform (or would like to prepare yourself for participating in this upcoming residency), you can get a PDF from there, too!

I initially wanted to attend this residency myself, as I have been involved in writing a Redbook before and really enjoyed the experience. However, recent changes forced me to retract my offer to volunteer. IBM covers the travel expenses and will take care of accomodation for the time of the residency. If you are interested and think you have the time and skills and you would like to expand your knowledge about MySQL on the i5/OS Platform, please contact me at firstname at MySQL dot com!

Yesterday, Drupal 6.0 was officially released - check out this screencast to get a 29-minute tour on the new features in this release.

We'd like to congratulate the Drupal Developer Team and Community for reaching this milestone and are happy that the MySQL Server continues to serve well as the database backend for this awesome content management platform!

I had the pleasure of evaluating and reviewing a previous release of Drupal for the Open Source Content Management System Award from Packt Publishing and it has been one of my favourites.

Keep up the good work!
 

Like in the years before, I (and some other colleagues from MySQL) will be attending FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels, Belgium on February 23rd and 24th.

The schedule is packed as usual and lists several MySQL-related topics and sessions:

• Main tracks: Unicoding With PHP 6 by Andrei Zmievski and the talk about CakePHP by Garrett J Woodworth are certainly relevant for web developers using PHP.
• Lightning talks: Jan Kneschke will speak about MySQL Proxy (not yet listed in the schedule, but likely between 15-16 o'clock on Sunday). Other sessions with MySQL relevance/relations are Kettle: extracting, transforming and loading data by Matt Casters and Alfresco: fresh document management approach by Philippe Dubois.
• DevRooms: The Drupal people have set up a DevRoom with a session track - Kris Buytaert will talk about Drupal and MySQL High Availability. Another DevRoom worth visiting will be the one organized by the Belgian Ruby User Group - they set up a Ruby on Rails Developer Room. My friends from the openSUSE project also have a great number of sessions lined up for their openSUSE Developer Room: several talks about the Build Service (proudly powered by MySQL) and a session about the openSUSE redirector (a tool to set up and manage a content delivery network with MySQL) by Peter Poeml.

If you also plan to attend, please ping me if you would like to meet!

When it comes to handling my work-related email, many people will probably conclude that I am an old fart in Linux terms: I still use the console-based Pine as my MUA of choice, as my fingers have been hardcoded to its key combinations over the years (my first encounter with Pine was around 1994 on a shared DEC Ultrix box in my university). So far, I have not found any other application that allows me to process email as quickly as by using this tool.

I admit that I do use Thunderbird for my personal email, though, to gather experience with it (and to toy around with the various extensions, especially Nostalgy is a gift from heaven for people like me!). And of course because the mail volume there is less critical to cope with! But I am not going to start a holy war here - this article is supposed to explain how I have configured my mail setup to rotate the log files that keep track of all my incoming mails.

We have just published an interview with our CEO Mårten Mickos on our Developer Zone, where he answers a number of questions from the Community Team about Sun's plans to acquire MySQL AB and what this means for the MySQL User Community and the direction of the product (thanks to Colin for compiling and editing the text). I hope that the comments help to calm the concerns of some people about the future of MySQL with regards to Open Source, support of platforms or language bindings:

CT: Is MySQL fully committed to free and open source software, and the GPL?
Mårten: Yes.
CT: What does the Sun acquisition mean for Linux support? What about Windows, Mac OS/X and other platforms?
Mårten: One of the reasons for us to be interested to discuss an acquisition with Sun was their new strategy to work with technologies and companies that previously had been seen as competitors. Our mandate within Sun is to grow our database business - on all operating systems and with all development and scripting languages and on all hardware platforms. Linux remains the most important operating system for our business. Windows remains the top operating system among our downloads. Mac OS X is a vital platform and many of our own engineers use Mac notebooks.
CT: Will all the language bindings still be supported? i.e Will PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc. be treated as well as Java?
Mårten: Absolutely. See my previous answer. Our goal and mandate is to grow our business on all fronts.

I personally am very excited about this change and expect many good things to come out of  it. Sun is really trying hard to "not screw this up" (quoting Jonathan Schwartz).

UPDATE: I just stumbled over another article about this topic, which I also consider recommended reading: Mårten Mickos: Why Did I Change My Mind?:

I may sound naively excited about Sun in my writing here, and perhaps I am. Perhaps I drank the Kool-Aid along with the traditional Swedish vodka shot when we closed the deal. But in my life and my professional career so far, I have never regretted using my gut instinct to choose between two rational alternatives.