Past Tuesday we had our 5th Belgian MySQL meetup with around 12 attendees, and it was great! I hoped for a large audience, but the spirits were good and we had some fun and good chats. I started out giving a brief history of MySQL and ending with Sun buying us. Important was to get the message out which Kaj explained us last week in Munich (Germany).

The main topic was Performance Tuning best practices, but I didn’t go intensively deep on it. This is something we should do again in a large group and just that presentation.

After that, we talked about communities and more importantly growing a PHP UserGroup in Belgium. Michelangelo and Felix are really doing great and it’s probably going to be a hit. I, and probably the whole MySQL Community team, would definitely like to help out to get it started.

I had some people commenting about doing these meetups during the day, during working hours. Yes, this would be nice, were it not that probably even less people would then come. If I’m sure there would be enough people, then I could think about. Remeber however that this is community work and no training/marketing/support sessions. Maybe in these times where the Sun shining, it might be possible.

Ah, and the free drink was well received, and well.. the Sun workstation promised for girls returning to the meetup, that station (sadly) stays with me.