Just as a friendly reminder about what I wrote a month ago: we've already received a number of great talk submissions for the MySQL & Friends Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011, thanks to everyone who contributed so far! However, we still are looking for some more!

You can submit your proposal via this form. The deadline for turning in your talk is Sunday, 26th of December, 2010.

Just to recapitulate, the DevRoom (H.2213) will be available to us on Saturday 5th 2011, from 13:00 till 19:00. Each session will last 20 minutes plus 5 minutes of Q&A. See this year's schedule for inspiration — I think we had a great lineup of talks that addressed a good mixture of MySQL-related topics. I am looking forward to your ideas and suggestions! Thanks in advance for your support.

In addition to the lightweight "headless" appliance (which can only be accessed and configured via a remote network connection), I've now also created a GUI-based version. This appliance starts a minimal GNOME desktop and a Mozilla Firefox browser, which in turn opens the Drupal installation page by default. I hope you will find this useful if you want to toy around and test Drupal 7 without having to go through the entire OS and LAMP stack configuration yourself. In fact, you can even test this appliance via the recently added test drive option from right out of your web browser!

The appliance is now also available in OVF format. SuSE Studio now also builds Amazon EC2 images, which don't seem to be available for download from the SUSE Gallery yet. I assume this is a recent addition to the continuously improving SUSE Studio functionality, hopefully these images will be made available soon.

If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the SQL mode and InnoDB mode. Using this configuration helps to ensure that Drupal works well with the current version of MySQL/InnoDB and does not use any "questionable" SQL statements. This might be especially interesting for additional modules - Drupal core did not reveal any problems using strict mode so far.

You can download disk images for VMware/Virtualbox/KVM or XEN from the SUSE Gallery (free login required). Just boot the appliance in your virtualization application of choice, choose your keyboard layout and step through the network configuration and Time Zone selection. Once the appliance has booted up and the login: prompt appeared, point your web browser to the appliance's IP address to start the Drupal installation/configuration. MySQL has been pre-configured, there is an empty database named "drupal" and a user "drupal" with the same password to access it. You just need to enter this information in the Drupal Database configuration dialogue during the installation. Anything else can be configured to your liking.

After you have finished the installation, you can toy around with a fresh Drupal 7 installation! Install additional modules, change the themes, add content. And make sure to report all bugs that you run into while doing so! Have fun.

This annual user group event will offer a place to share knowledge and hear the latest information from key personnel about product development. This event is a technical event and not a marketing event and we'd like to encourage you to submit a MySQL-related talk!

Some more information about this conference:

• Dates: Monday 29th November – Wednesday 1st December
• Location: The ICC, Birmingham
• Size: Approximately 2000 attendees

They have made an exception for the MySQL session stream and extended the call for papers deadline until Monday, 16th of August, 8:00 am (UK).

If you are interested to speak about MySQL or you know somebody who would, please pass this information on and submit your proposal via this link as soon as possible. Once you've registered, the speaker loungeshould provide a button "Add abstract" that allows you to submit your talk.

Thanks in advance! We look forward to your submission and another great conference.

This annual user group event will offer a place to share knowledge and hear the latest information from key personnel about product development. This event is a technical event and not a marketing event and we'd like to encourage you to submit a MySQL-related talk!

Some more information about this conference:

• Dates: Monday 29th November – Wednesday 1st December
• Location: The ICC, Birmingham
• Size: Approximately 2000 attendees

They have made an exception for the MySQL session stream and extended the call for papers deadline until Monday, 16th of August, 8:00 am (UK).

If you are interested to speak about MySQL or you know somebody who would, please pass this information on and submit your proposal via this link as soon as possible. Once you've registered, the speaker loungeshould provide a button "Add abstract" that allows you to submit your talk.

Thanks in advance! We look forward to your submission and another great conference.

If you wonder why there hasn't been an update from me for quite a while — I just returned from two months of paternal leave, in which I actually managed to stay away from the PC most of the time. In the meanwhile, I've officially become an Oracle employee and there is a lot of administrative things to take care of... But it feels good to be back!

During my absence, Giuseppe and Felix kicked off the Call for Papers for this year's European OpenSQL Camp, which will again take place in parallel to FrOSCon in St. Augustin (Germany) on August 21st/22nd. We've received a number of great submissions, now we would like to ask our community about your favourites!

Basically it's "one vote per person per session" and you can cast your votes in two ways, either by twittering @opensqlcamp or via the opensqlcamp mailing list. The procedure is outlined in more detail on this wiki page.

As we need to finalize the schedule and inform the speakers, the voting period will close this coming Sunday, 18th of July. So don't hesitate, cast your votes now! Based on your feedback we will compile the session schedule for this year's camp. Thanks for your help!

Since this question has come up several times before, I thought it might make sense to blog about my take on this.

First of all, please note that there is a difference between "being part of the core distribution" and "being available from a distributor's package repository". The latter one is relatively easy, the former can be hard, as you need to convince the distributor that your application is worth devoting engineering resources to maintain and support your application as part of their product. It's also a space issue – distributions need to make sure that the core packages still fit on the installation media (e.g. CD-ROMs or a DVD). Therefore they take a very close look at each package and if it's really needed to be part of the installation medium or if it's fine to provide it for download from a package repository instead.

Distributors prefer to keep their core product small and restricted to the "basic OS building blocks". While MySQL might still be considered to be a part of this, this probably does not apply to the various plugins and extensions that are available for it. Therefore the best approach is to invest some engineering time and start doing the packaging yourself, either by hiring an engineer capable of creating and maintaining the packages, or by finding someone in your community who has the required experiences and is willing to do it.

While it's of course possible to set up and maintain your own build and package hosting infrastructure for that, I recommend to make use of the existing services provided by the distributors.

The top tier distributors all provide means of offloading the maintenance of "non-core" packages to their community, offering various options for packages to be made available. For example, Novell/openSUSE provide the free "Build Service", which is capable of building packages for other distributions as well (e.g. Fedora, Mandriva, Debian/Ubuntu, etc.). In addition to automating the builds, the Build Service also takes care of the distribution via their download mirror network and ensures that your application can be found via their package search interface.

Red Hat/Fedora provide something similar, named "Koji" – but it's "Fedora only". Here's a HOWTO that outlines the process of becoming a Fedora package maintainer.

Ubuntu/Canonical have "Personal Package Archives (PPAs) – if your project is hosted on Launchpad already, that might be something to look into for providing Debian/Ubuntu packages. Alternatively you could join the Debian project and start building and maintaining your package there. They maintain a list of "Work-Needing and Prospective Packages", a description of the process on how to become a new maintainer is outlined here.

If you'd like to target Solaris/OpenSolaris as well, there is the OpenSolaris Source Juicer – a web service which allows OpenSolaris community developers to build packages (using RPM spec files) and publish them for review, so they will be included in an official package repository. The Software Porters Community Group coordinates, advocates, encourages and helps with the porting of Software from multiple Platforms to the OpenSolaris Platform.

Keep the following saying in mind, which especially holds true in the Open Source world: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression!". While the most important thing is of course to have a compelling and useful product, this blog post is an attempt to highlight some other aspects about community building and providing the adequate infrastructure. This insight is based on my own experiences and my observations from talking with many people involved in OSS startups and projects.

First off, I would like to thank all of the participants and supporters, particularly my colleagues Regina Steyer and Iris Musiol for the perfect logistics and co-sponsoring as well as Uli Graef, Thorsten Frueauf, Matthias Schmidt, Alexander Rubin and Joerg Moellenkamp for manning the Sun booth and the help on site.

Another big Thank You goes out to my team mates Giuseppe and Colin as well as to Sheeri K. Cabral, who were a big help in keeping the OpenSQL Camp on track and by supporting the event by giving talks. In addition to that, Sheeri recorded most of the OpenSQL Camp sessions on video and published them in record time!

So here's a quick summary of both events from my side, starting with the main conference.

Sun was a Gold sponsor of the event and we had a booth right at the main entrance area; it could hardly be missed. It consisted of two large and two small desks as well as a divider behind them. For demos, we had a (slightly noisy) Sun Fire X2200 M2 Server and four SunRay 2 Thin Clients (which by themselves triggered a lot of questions and curiosity by many visitors). The booth was flanked by rollup-banners on both sides as well as various posters attached to the divider. Here's a picture of our booth before the event opened:



We demoed Open Solaris, Open HA Cluster, NetBeans/Java and MySQL. We also had a lot of brochures about various products, OpenSolaris 2009.06 Live-CDs incl. booklets as well as some MySQL-T-Shirts to hand out. We distributed over 300 CDs and received a lot of positive feedback about the distribution.

We also had a number of talks in the main conference track (both German and English):

• Lenz Grimmer: Working for a Virtual Company - How we do it at MySQL (OGG Video)
• Giuseppe Maxia: MySQL Sandbox 3 - Making your life with databases easier than ever (OGG Video)
• Ulrich Graef: ZFS - Neue Funktionen und Technologien
• Thorsten Früauf: Hochverfügbarkeit mit minimalem Cluster - Open HA Cluster on OpenSolaris (OGG Video)
• Jörg Möllenkamp: Insights to Opensolaris (OGG Video)

The comments and ratings of these sessions were generally very positive. Our booth was well attended, especially during the session breaks. In total, there were over 1.400 visitors at the conference over the two days.

I personally did not attend many sessions in the main conference tracks, as I was too occupied with the OpenSQL Camp and the booth organization. However, I managed to listen to Uli Graef's talk, which was a very technical and interesting session about ZFS features and internals. Being a big fan of ZFS myself, this was a very worthwhile session to be at and my impression was that it encouraged others to take a closer look at this truly amazing file system.

The second talk I attended was Sunday's keynote by Dries Buytaert from the Drupal project about "The Secrets of Building and Participating in Open Source
Communities". Dries is a great speaker with visually stunning slides. He is funny, too — if you have a moment, you should watch the video recording of his keynote. An uncut "pre-release" version of his talk is already available as an OGG Video file.

As for previous FrOSCons (is that the proper plural?), there was a social event scheduled for Saturday evening, providing barbecue (Steaks and Sausages as well as vegetarian dishes) and drinks. This event usually takes place outside and is always an excellent opportunity for networking and talking with key people from other OSS communities and projects. And there was plenty of time for talking - the queues for the grilled food were long...

Here is a list of other blogs and articles about FrOSCon that are worth a read (in no particular order and both German and English):

• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5878-FrOSCon-2009-first-day.html
• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5879-FrOSCon-09-Nachlese.html
• http://blogs.sun.com/TF/entry/hochverf%C3%BCgbarkeit_mit_minimalem_cluster
• http://robilad.livejournal.com/53194.html
• http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/froscon_the_free_and_open
• http://www.linux-magazin.de/content/view/full/43032
• http://community.oreilly.de/blog/2009/08/25/das-war-die-froscon-2009/
• http://www.naturalnik.de/wordpress/2009/08/froscon-2009/
• http://www.alexander-stelter.de/blog/archives/361-FrOSCon-2009-Review-+-Bilder.html

OpenSQL Camp, European Edition

In addition to the main conference tracks, FrOSCon also provided a number of so-called "Developer Rooms" to OSS projects, so that they could organize sub-conferences or hackfests of their own. We applied for a room to set up a conference dubbed "OpenSQL Camp", related to the topic of Open Source databases, which was approved.

We then sent out a call for papers and invited people from the many OSS database communities to join us and talk about their projects. Every session proposal was published on the OpenSQL Camp web site and people were able to vote on the sessions they were most interested in via email or twitter:

• http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/2009/Proposed_Sessions
• http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/2009/Reviewing_and_Voting

The organization and scheduling of the talks and speakers was done via the FrOSCon conference system (Pentabarf), which made it very easy to perform this task and also made sure that the OpenSQL Camp sessions were included in the main conference program. Below is a full list of sessions at our subconference (see the FrOSCon Program page for abstracts, speaker info, links and slides). We had two cancellations by speakers on short notice, but were able to cover the gaps with ad-hoc presentations. I'd like to send a special thanks to Geert Vanderkelen, who gave a great presentation about MySQL Cluster despite the very short notice and some technical difficulties at the beginning!

• Sheeri K. Cabral: A Better mysqltuner (Video)
• Linas Virbalas: Bringing Master/Slave into the 21st Century using Tungsten Database Clustering (Video)
• Holger Klemt: Firebird - a really free database used in free and commercial projects (Video)
• Seppo Jaakola: Galera Replication (Video)
• Kristian Waagan: Getting acquainted with Apache Derby (Video)
• Stephane Combaudon: Minimizing data access with covering indexes
• Lenz Grimmer: MySQL High Availability Solutions (Video)
• Jan Kneschke: MySQL Proxy: a MySQL toolbox (Video)
• Felix Schupp: New kid on the block: The BlackRay Data Engine (Video)
• Vladimir Kolesnikov: PBXT: Technology trends that affect your database (Video)
• Panel Discussion: The OSS Toolshed Shootout (Video)
• Darren Cassar: Securich - MySQL user administration and security made easy!
• Giuseppe Maxia: Sharding for the masses (Video)
• Geert Vanderkelen: An introduction to MySQL Cluster

Most talks attracted between 20-50 attendees and we had a great mix of topics from several different database projects (with a slight majority of MySQL-related talks). The Panel Discussion (moderated by me), called the "OSS Toolshed Shootout" went quite well and the speakers had a good time answering questions on various topics about their projects. Thanks again to all OpenSQL Camp speakers for making this event a success!

All in all I think that both FrOSCon and OpenSQL Camp were well worth supporting and attending - we were able to provide insight and trigger some interesting discussions among the OSS enthusiasts and developers in the audience. It was also a good opportunity in get in touch with many people of other OSS communities, fostering the MySQL (and other Sun OSS projects) ecosystem.

Here is a Flickr slide show of my own pictures - more photos can be found in the FrOSCon Gallery and the links page on the Wiki.

I personally look forward to next year's FrOSCon - a Big Thanks to the organizers for another great event!