Lenz Grimmer's blog

I am excited to announce that the phpMyAdmin project confirmed to be present at the DotOrg Pavilion of our MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara next month. Thanks a lot to Marc Delisle for the quick reply and arrangement of a representative. One more good addition to the excellent program we've already lined up!

By the way, we still have some open slots to give away for interested projects! So if you're a developer or member of an Open Source project that utilizes MySQL, here's your chance to show off your work to a very special audience. The exhibition will be open on Tuesday and Wednesday, but we'll provide each project with one free conference pass that will entitle you to attend all the other conference sessions! If you are interested in participating, please contact us at community at mysql dot com for more details.

I finally managed to hook into our wireless LAN here at our conference hotel. The flight from Hamburg to Naples via Munich was uneventful, I met Jan at Hamburg airport and we bumped into a whole bunch of MySQLers at the Munich airport already. From Naples airport it was another exciting hour to Sorrento in a small bus - I completely forgot that Italians have a slightly different driving style than us germans

I am looking forward to the meeting which officially starts tomorrow. I will be giving a presentation about the MySQL Community work and hope to encourage some more of our developers to become more active in there...

FrOSCon is a two-day conference on free software and open source, which takes place on 24th and 25th June 2006 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

The Call for Papers ends on March 15th - so you better hurry if you want to give a presentation there! I proposed two MySQL-related talks and also asked some other colleagues to file a few submissions. There is enough stuff happening here to talk about

By the way, their registration frontend is very slick - it's called pentabarf (which I personally think is a weird name) and is powered by Ruby on Rails.

The first Hamburg MySQL User Group meeting was held yesterday evening. It took place at 19:00 in a chinese restaurant named Ni Hao - they had a separate room for us that also provided a video projector. The location was suggested by Jens Bollmann, thanks a lot for the hint! We had a pretty good lineup from the MySQL side: Jens Bollmann (Consulting), Jan Kneschke (MySQL Network Development), Kai Voigt (Training/Consulting), Ulf Wendel (MaxDB) and myself (Community) were present. We had a total of 35 people attending.

I started the meeting with introducing myself and the community relations team and giving a short presentation about MySQL (the company - some facts and figures). I then asked everbody to shortly introduce himself to the others. After the round of introductions dinner was served - the food was excellent. There was a lot of chatter and discussion during this time.

After the food Kai gave a presentation about MySQL Cluster (by popular demand), which also led to some interesting discussions and comments. After the presentation, a few people left while others stuck around for another beer and more talking. We wrapped up at around 23:30. I received a lot of positive comments, people really liked the event and were asking to do it again. We will discuss this over the mailing list in the coming days. I've taken some pictures of the meeting, which are now available from the gallery. The slides of Kai's and my talk are available from here.

All in all, the meeting was very well received and (from my perspective) a great success. Thanks to everybody who participated! I look forward to the next one.

Alfredo announced the availability of version 1.0.5 beta of the MySQL Workbench, the latest product in the MySQL GUI tools family (also check out the Administrator, Query Browser and the Migration Toolkit).

I downloaded the RPM for SUSE Linux 9.3, which installed flawlessly on my SUSE 10.0 system. To test the reverse engineering capabilities, I installed the latest version of the Sakila sample database, which also worked very well. Kudos to our GUI team for the good work!

Some days ago I interviewed Ian Linden, the Director of Operations at Linden Lab (the company behind the virtual world simulation Second Life) about Second Life, Linux, MySQL and other OSS usage for their operations. I actually performed the interview inside of Second Life, which was quite fun, especially now that there is a Linux client! You can read the full interview on the MySQL Developer Zone. Have a nice weekend!

Update: The interview is now listed on the Featured Articles page on the MySQL Developer Zone, too. If you would like to know more about Second Life and MySQL, Ian will speak about this topic in more detail at our MySQL Users Conference.

The release of MySQL 5.0 introduced the MySQL Instance Manager (IM), which intends to replace the mysqld_safe wrapper script as well as the mysqld_multi script that keeps track of multiple MySQL instances running on the same machine.

This article will qive you a quick overview about the IM and how to enable and configure a minimal setup that uses the IM to manage the default mysqld instance. I used MySQL 5.1.7-beta for my tests, some of this may work differently on other versions of MySQL.

Continue reading "Enabling and using the MySQL Instance Manager (IM)"

I had an exciting weekend at the FOSDEM Conference in Brussels. Initially I planned on writing a few blog entries while at the event (while memory was still fresh), but the Internet access there was very flaky and it was almost impossible to get a working wireless connection. So here is my (slighly belated) writeup. Continue reading "FOSDEM writeup"

This is just remind you that the first Hamburg MySQL User Group meeting will take place on Monday, 6th of March, 19:00. For more details please see my initial announcement and join our mailing list!

Currently, we have about 30 people that will attend. I will give a short general presentation about MySQL (the company), later Kai will give a presentation on MySQL Cluster.

If you'd like to join us, please register via meetup.com or OpenBC. Looking forward to meeting you!

Later today I will be heading off to the sixth Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting in Brussels, Belgium. I look forward to the various sessions and meeting with the members of other Open Source projects, especially the folks from the openSUSE team. I hope this meeting allows me to build closer relations to other OSS projects that use or support MySQL in any way.

See you there! After having checked into my hotel tonight, I'll try to find my way to Le Roy d'Espagne to meet with others that arrived today.

Today I sent out the invitations for the first MySQL User Group Meeting in Hamburg on Monday, the 6th of March at 19:00 o'clock. It will take place in the Chinese Restaurant Ni-Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek. If you would like to attend, please join our mailing list and stay tuned for further info!

I just stumbled over this little helper (written by Christopher Brown-Floyd), which allows you to search the MySQL manual by entering a search term in the web search bar. Neat!

Arjen already mentioned this in December, but let me remind you anway: we would like to showcase some Open Source projects that use or support MySQL in the MySQL Community Pavilion at our MySQL User Conference 2006 in Santa Clara, California.

So if you are a member of a project that utilizes MySQL in a cool way, here is your chance to show off!

Repeating Arjen's words here: Primarily, we would like to hear from projects which are not backed/run by a company, because companies of course already have the opportunity to become a sponsor/exhibitor.

Also, note that the conference is in Santa Clara, California - while we can provide space, we are unable to fund everybody's travel/accomodation costs. So if you are overseas and unable to make it, perhaps someone else more local who also works on the project can come...

Anyway, send message to community at our main domain name, subject "MySQL UC2006 Community Pavilion" telling us the name of your project, a description of the project, website URL, other relevant details, who is involved, and which people would actually be coming to the conference (and their email addresses). Someone from the community department (probably Colin) will collect all the info so we can plan from there.

I finally finished my interview with Kai Seidler, who is one of the people behind the very popular XAMPP project.

You can now read the interview on the MySQL Developer Zone - I hope you will enjoy it!

A few days ago, the MySQL GUI team announced new maintenance releases of both the MySQL Administrator (1.1.6) and Query Browser (1.1.18).

I now built RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.0/x86 - you can get them from my RPM Download section. Have fun!