Past and Future Conferences, and Talks Around MySQL

Time flies, and my blogging frequency is quite low. More frequent would be better, but knowing myself I'll rather not promise anything ;-)

Still, it is appropriate to write some notes about CeBIT, the "Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2016", and future events.

CeBIT

CeBIT was running from March 14 to 18 (Monday till Friday) in Hannover, Germany, and I will leave the general assessment to the various marketing departments as well as to the regular visitors (to which I do not belong).

In order to meet our current customers as well as potential future ones, FromDual had a booth in the "Open Source Forum". We displayed a Galera Cluster, running on three tiny headless single-board Linux machines, and showed how it reacts to node failures and then recovers all by itself, without any administrator intervention. Many of our visitors were fascinated, because a HA solution would be a good fit in their solution architecture. We had got several stuffed dolphins "Sakila", the traditional MySQL symbol, and all of them found new homes (typically with the words "for my grandchild"). :-)

IMHO, the "Open Source Forum" had deserved a better visitor attraction than it really got - placing it into one hall with document management systems was no good fit, research and development might have been more appropriate.
The forum had an area for talks which were running all five days, I consider John "Maddog" Hall (who had provided an Alpha machine to Linus Torvalds decades ago) and Prof. Klaus Knopper (who is maintaining the "Knoppix" live distribution) the most prominent speakers. FromDual's Oli Sennhauser talked about the new features of MySQL 5.7, you can get the slides via the FromDual download page.

Chemnitzer Linux-Tage

The weekend following CeBIT, March 19 and 20, had been selected for the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. Like in the previous years, the conference attracted many visitors from all over Germany as well as from some neighbouring countries, and both John Hall and Klaus Knopper had come there directly from Hannover - like me and several others.

As usual, the conference programme covered all aspects of Linux, the headline was "It is your project!". Databases are definitely not one of the major topics there, it is more about overall trends, distributions, communication, and many other aspects.

I delivered a talk about "RPM conventions - a Modern Tower of Bable", and it was well received. I am using various MySQL RPMs (from MySQL AB, Oracle, or RedHat) as examples to show different opinions about packaging, dependencies, installation actions, and compatibility issues, which partly originate from the diverging positions of software developer vs distributor. MySQL was used as a well-known example (but will interest my readers here), most of the items are also applicable to almost any software. Again, the slides (in German) are available on the FromDual web site. Your comments are welcome!

Open Source Data Center Conference

We all know that Open Source has become a major force in computing, so it is no surprise to have it as the subject for various conferences.

One of them is the "Open Source Data Center Conference" "OSDC", to be held in Berlin on April 26 - 28. Open Source database systems are one of the topics, and the programme committee accepted my talk "MySQL-Server in Teamwork - Replication and Galera Cluster". After the conference, I will upload it on the FromDual site and make it available for download.

Now, having told you all this, i will turn to customer issues again ...

Enjoy!