Lenz Grimmer's blog

Just a short reminder: the Hamburg MySQL Meetup Group will meet next week, on Monday the 4th of February! As usual, there will be a MySQL-related talk - this time I will use this opportunity to practice my talk about "Performing MySQL Backups using LVM Snapshots" that I will present at the upcoming MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 in Santa Clara, CA. In addition to that I assume that there will be some questions about the acquisition of MySQL AB by Sun - I will try to answer these as good as I can. Looking forward to meet you next week. Please make sure to RSVP either via Meetup.com or Xing.com, so I can keep track of the number of attendees! Thanks!

 

 

Just a quick reminder for those of you located near Hamburg, Germany: on Monday, June 4th at 19:00 there will be our 7th MySQL Meetup. As usual, we will gather at the Chinese Restaurant "Ni Hao". This time, Sönke Ruempler will give a talk about the PHP-ORM-Framework "Propel". If you'd like to join, don't hesitate to RSVP via meetup.com or Xing.com right away! Thanks - see you there!

Yesterday we had our sixth MySQL Meetup here in Hamburg - we had a nice crowd of 21 people. Erick Dennis and Michael Otto from epublica gave a presentation about their experiences with MySQL and scaling it to keep up with the growth of the Xing.com web site. The talk was a rehearsal for their presentation at the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara - it went very well and we had good discussions and comments during and after the session. I took some pictures during the meeting, which are now available on my picture gallery. The meeting was rounded up with excellent chinese food, thanks again for the folks at the Ni Hao for hosting us! I look forward to our next meeting, which will take place some time in May. If you have a suggestion for a presentation, please let me know!

It's time for another Meetup of the Hamburg MySQL User Group! As for previous events, we'll meet on Monday, 2nd of April at 19:00 in the Chinese restaurant Ni Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek.

This time there will be a presentation about "Xing/OpenBC growing pains", held by Erick Dennis und Michael Otto from epublica, the company behind Xing.com.

The talk will be held in english and is a rehearsal for their presentation at our upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo, which will take place from April 23rd-26th in Santa Clara, California. Please subscribe to our mailing list and RSVP, if you plan to attend the Meetup. Thank you!

I just learned from my colleagues in our Dublin office that Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB will be visiting them this coming weekend. They would like to take this opportunity to arrange a MySQL User Group Meeting, which will take place on Saturday, 27th of January, 18:00 o'clock in their offices:

MySQL Ireland,
Ground Floor, Misys Building,
Eastpoint Business Park,
Dublin 3
Ireland

This is your chance to meet and talk with Mårten and other MySQLers. There will also be free food and drinks and most likely a tech talk about MySQL (details will follow). So if you are located somewhere around Dublin, make sure to attend this event!

I've already sent out the invitation and announcements to various channels, but let me repeat it once more: the 5th Hamburg MySQL User Group Meetup is coming up on Monday, 5th of Februrary. So far, 15 people have already RSVPed, so it's going to be a fun evening again. If you have not done so yet, please register via meetup.com or Xing soon! I will give a 15 minute lightning talk about "What's new at MySQL AB", but we're still looking for another MySQL-related talk. If you want to share your experiences with MySQL or talk about a certain application or tool that has a relation to MySQL, please let me know! As usual, we'll meet a 19:00 at the Chinese Restaurant "Ni Hao", Wandsbeker Zollstraße 25-29, 22041 Hamburg.

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!

Just to remind you: tonight at 19:00 we'll meet at our usual place - please see me previous announcement for details. According to the RSVPs I received, we should be around 20 people. Paul McCullagh will talk about the PBXT Storage Engine, so this sounds like a fun evening. See you 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!

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!

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.

If you happen to use MySQL and live around Hamburg, Germany, here's your chance to meet with other MySQL users, developers and DBAs: I am happy to announce the second Hamburg MySQL Usergroup Meeting, which will take place on Monday, 3rd of July, 19:00. The location will be the same one as last time, the chinese restaurant Ni Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek.  The food there is quite excellent and they will provide us with a separate room and video projector again. I'll try to arrange a presentation about MySQL and there will be plenty of time for chatting and discussing. If you'd like to join us, please RSVP via our event page on meetup.com and join the mailing list for further details! Looking forward to meeting you! Some pictures of our last meeting are available in my gallery.

Frappr is an interesting way of showing the geographic locations of people that share a common interest. It's based on Google Maps and of course there is MySQL Users Group, too!

Last night I returned home from our internal MySQL Developer Meeting in Sorrento, Italy. The trip again was uneventful (something I certainly don't mind) and I used it to catch up with email and other work that I could not take care of while being at the conference.

The event was very well organized (kudos to Carol and the rest of the team!) and I enjoyed meeting old and new colleagues. It was nice being able to discuss stuff from face to face and hearing about what's cooking at the various other parts of the company in more detail. Too bad that we sometimes had so many tracks in parallel - it was difficult at times to decide which session to attend without fearing to miss something else. I gave a presentation about SUSE Linux (why it's the best Linux distro to use) and how our developers can help to foster our user community.

On Monday evening, we arranged a small meeting with local community users, some of them actually came all the way from Rome! David Axmark gave a presentation about MySQL (the company), later we headed out for dinner in a local Sorrento restaurant. The food was excellent and I got the impression that everybody had a great time!

Now I'm back home in Hamburg, where it's cold and nasty outside and there's still plenty of snow. I miss the spring-like weather that we had the past days and I am a bit envious about the folks that are still there (the meeting ends on Sunday, I left earlier).

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.