Lenz Grimmer's blog

I just realized that I haven't blogged for more than a month! Shame on me. But I will blame it on being away on conferences and vacation for quite some time And if you are following me on twitter, you may have noticed what I was going on in my life and that I did't get hit by a bus...

So what was going on since I returned back home from the MySQL Conference? First off, I uploaded und sorted my pictures from the conference and the Drizzle developer day on Flickr. I also uploaded the slides (PDF) from Colin and myself speaking about "MySQL Server Backup, Restoration, and Disaster Recovery Planning" to the MySQL Conference site and they are now available for download from the session page.

On May 4th and 5th I attended the amoocon in Rostock, Germany - a conference primarily about Open Source Telephony and VoIP, where I gave two talks (in German) about MySQL HA Solutions and MySQL Backup and Security Best Practices. There were several other MySQL-related sessions at this conference (e.g. Geert speaking about MySQL Cluster) and I was quite impressed to learn about how widely used it is in the VoIP/Telephony sector. The PDFs of my slides for both talks are available from the conference web site as well as on my slidespace on SlideShare (a very convenient service that I recently started using). There even is an MP3 and video recording of the HA talk, which is also linked from the session page mentioned above.

Right after the amoocon, I attended the next09 conference, which took place in Hamburg, Germany. On the first day I helped manning the Sun booth for some time (Sun Startup Essentials Germany was a sponsor of the event) and listened to some talks, on Wednesday I gave a presentation about "Working for a Virtual Company: How do we do it at MySQL?". A video recording of my talk is available from sevenload. Last time I checked the video was truncated, but I hope they will publish a complete version of it soon. Unfortunately I had a very bad speaking slot - the very first one in the morning (9:00am), after there was a party/social event going on the night before... But luckily there still were ~20-30 people in the audience. This was the first time that I gave this presentation and talked about something less technical, which was actually quite fun! As for the other recent talks, the slides are on SlideShare.

From May 14th to the 16th I was in Verona, Italy to speak about MySQL Backup and Security and bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system at the Italian phpDay. This was quite a nice event with ~150 attendees and Rasmus Lerdorf giving two talks as well. However, many of the sessions were in Italian, so I decided to spend some time walking around the city and taking lots of pictures. I also took a number pictures from the conference, but the light was pretty dim in the room and many shots turned out to be too blurry. Next year they plan to have the phpDay in Rimini - I definitely plan to be there!

Greetings from the University of Latvia in Riga, where the local activities related to Software Freedom Day 2008 are in full swing! We've just finished the introductionary talk "Software freedom in Latvia"  by Evijs Taube (LATA) and Leo Trukšāns (Linux Centre). Currently, Mark Callaghan from Google Inc. is talking about "Running a database when your business depends on it". We've more talks scheduled for the rest of the day and there also is an ongoing workshop about MySQL Performance tuning by Jay Pipes, which takes place in the University's Linux Lab. The full agenda is published on the MySQL Forge Wiki and I just published a first batch of pictures on my gallery. Enjoy!

I'm back home from DrupalCon 2008 now - it has been a great event! I met a lot of nice people from the Drupal Community and learned a lot about this CMS. I've been very busy in uploading the remaining pictures from the event to my gallery - so here's for your viewing pleasure:

• Impressions from Szeged
• Day One - 2008-08-27
• Day Two - 2008-08-28
• Day Three - 2008-08-29
• Day Four - 2008-08-30

I also gave two talks and held a BoF there - the slides have now been attached to the session nodes, one of them (the HA session) even includes a video recording:

• bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system
• MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices
• High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo (Video)

I've also uploaded some pictures from FrOSCon to my Gallery now, hope you enjoy them! The slides of my FrOSCon talks are now uploaded to the conference system as well:

• OpenSolaris für Linuxer
• bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system

Hello and greetings from DrupalCon 2008 in Szeged, Hungary!

We (Thierry Manfé, Scott Mattoon and myself) are having a great time manning our booth and talking about Drupal, MySQL and Open Source@Sun with the nice crowd of Drupal Users and Developers here. Sun is a gold sponsor of the event and we're giving a number of sessions as well.

Today I gave my first presentation about MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices - unfortunately I ran a tad bit out of time at the end... The slides have already been attached to the session page, so you can read up on the last few things I was going to talk about. Feel free to contact me, if you have further questions!

Tomorrow I'll be talking about High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo, which will also include a practical demonstration of a two-Node Linux Cluster, performed by Jakub Suchy. In the afternoon, I will also hold a BoF about bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system

I've also uploaded some pictures from the event (and some impressions from the city) on my gallery (more will follow later). Enjoy!

Last weekend I finally found some time to upload pictures that I had taken during various events that I attended in the past few months. So here are my impressions from the following events:

• PHP Unconference in Hamburg on 2008-04-26
• MySQL Meetup Mashup in Hamburg, 2008-04-07
• MySQL Meetup Mashup in Berlin, 2008-04-08
• MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 in Santa Clara, 2008-04 (these are available from flickr as well)
• CommunityOne in San Francisco, 2008-05-05
• JavaOne in San Francisco, 2008-05
• LinuxTag in Berlin, 2008-05

These are probably the last pictures that I have taken with my trusty old Pentax Optio S4 - I just received my new camera, a Canon PowerShot A720 IS. I have just started to toy around with it, but the first results look promising! The Pentax served me well for several years - I've taken 9745 pictures with it. But it had a few deficiencies, particularly the slow startup and flash recharge time and the bad quality of pictures indoors bothered me for quite a while. But it is very small and handy and the metal housing makes it quite sturdy.

The first picture taken with my new camera: a picture of the old one.

And probably the last picture taken using the old camera: my new Canon.

I made it to the US safely, even though I almost missed my connecting flight in Heathrow (even my luggage made it, hooray!). I reached the Hotel just in time to directly head off to the traditional pre-conference party at Mårten's house. However, we just stayed there shortly (barely long enough to say hi to everybody) and then headed to the MySQL pre-conference dinner (organized by Arjen). It was nice meeting such a large number of the key MySQL community people in one place! I was especially surprised about the presence of Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green - this added a nice touch!

Today I am attending Stewart's tutorial session about MySQL Cluster. So far it has been quite entertaining and informative! We'll continue with hands-on excercises on setting up a cluster configuration on the attendees' laptops after the lunch break.

I have uploaded pictures from yesterday and this morning to my foto set on flickr (which I will also post to the MySQL Conference 08 Flickr group) and will try to continue doing so for the rest of the conference. Enjoy!

Better late then never: I've now uploaded a few pics that I've taken during this year's FrOSCon to my gallery. Have fun!
 

Yesterday we had our fourth MySQL User Group Meeting here in Hamburg. We had 19 attendees and a very informative talk about Ruby on Rails/Active record, held by Stefan Saasen. Thanks a lot, Stefan! It was quite insightful and we had good discussions and excellent food afterwards. I look forward to our next meeting, which I have already scheduled for February, 5th! So save the date and RSVP!

Some pictures of our meeting are in my Gallery, a PDF of Stefan's talk can be obtained from here. Enjoy and see you next time!

It is really noticable that the summer is over now. While it was quite silent during the past few months, the last quarter of the year will be packed with conferences and events again.

And we will contribute our share to it, too: in addition to sending speakers to various upcoming events, MySQL will also host two European MySQL User conferences next week. The MySQL Northern Europe Customer Conference will take place in London (UK), on Tuesday, October 17th 2006. Two days later, the MySQL Central Europe Customer Conference will be held in Munich (Germany) on Thursday, October 19th 2006. Both are one-day events, with two tracks of talks in parallel. The sessions will be held by both MySQL employees as well as customers, talking about their experiences in using MySQL in their environments.

I attended a similar event in Warsaw, Poland two weeks ago, where I spoke about MySQL, Open Source and Community in front of an audience of about 350 people. The organizers actually had to close the registration four weeks before the event, as they could not arranger a larger room on short notice. A few pictures of the confererence can be found in my Gallery. I was very impressed by the audience and the interest about OSS and MySQL in particular. We received a lot of good comments and had nice discussions with the attendees.

On Thursday this week (the 12th), I will be speaking at the Linux Business Day in Luebeck, Germany. It will be a general session about MySQL (both the company and the product) as well as the benefits of Open Source Software in general and MySQL in particular.

Today I uploaded a batch of pictures into my gallery and I also re-arranged a number of albums into a separate Conferences and Events collection. The latest additions in there (yes, some should have been uploaded some time ago already!):

• EuroOSCON 2005 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Open Source Database Conference 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany
• FOSDEM 2006 Conference in Brussels, Belgium
• MySQL Developer Meeting 2006 in Sorrento, Italy (pictures from other MySQLers can be found on Flickr, too)