My three previous blog posts I already wrote from Froscon. In this post I still want to go back and mention some people I met and discussions I had.

The MySQL side

There were of course many MySQL people, with both SkySQL and Oracle sponsoring. It was great to meet Carsten from Oracle, who has joined the MySQL Sales Engineer team in Europe (he moved from an OpenOffice position). That's my former team, so it was great to see a new face!

Going there the person I was most looking forward to meet was Hana Hütter, formerly a MySQL account manager for Central Europe, and now doing the same at SkySQL. My first ever MySQL sales gig was with Hana, and Ralf Gebhart who is also now with SkySQL but was not at Froscon. While Ralf was there only that first time to teach me how to be a Sales Engineer, with Hana we then continued to sell MySQL into telecom companies in many European cities. I had not met Hana since I left Sun. It was really great to see again. We had lunch, I told about my experiments with Galera and she told about her customers being interested in it too. It was great to get in touch with the "frontlines" again!

She also told me a great story about MySQL adoption in Europe...

People often assume the reason I talk at conferences is because I like to teach them about Galera, MySQL and other cool, open source things. That's of course true to some extent. But for me personally, another reason is even more important: It happens almost always that the audience teaches me something. Thus the process of public speaking has increasingly become my way to learn new insights. Low level details that aren't easy to learn by just RTFM.

I just uploaded my slides from my Open DB Camp / Froscon talk to Slideshare:

Speaking of conferences, in general, and OpenSQLCamps in particular, there is one a week from now, and I will be speaking! It is organized as a single room track at Froscon, Germany, by Felix Schupp (Blackray/Softmethod) and Volker Oboda (Primebase). The content is mostly a collection of database related talks originally submitted via the main Froscon call for papers. (In other words, unlike many previous camps, the schedule is all set.)

I'm a little excited about this one, because for the first time in my career as speaker I will be giving the keynote. The title of my talk is

How I learned to use SQL and how I learned not to use it