Last week the first edition of the Open Source Data Center conference (or OSDC) took place in Nuremberg, Germany. It was organized by Netways, who are also doing the Nagios conference. They indeed know how to organize! I was quite sick that day, and had to leave the second day for home. Talks were mixed. I learned about Puppet, and I wish I had it during the years I was a sys-admin.

I’m happy to announce (bit unofficially) the first (alpha) source code release of MySQL Connector/Python. It’s hosted on Launchpad and can be downloaded using the Bazaar client. It’s more a preview as I’m still working on it during free time. Please post comments, bug reports, ideas, critics, etc..

I’ve not been doing system administration for years, so I missed out on Puppet. It looks pretty cool to administer machines and services. Looking through the recipies I found some example for MySQL setting the root password. Interesting stuff. I’ve downloaded and installed it on my Mac. It’s written in Ruby. I’ll check it further making maybe something around MySQL Cluster then. If possible, maybe even before my talk at the Open Source Data Center conference in Nuremberg, Germany.

Yesterday I talked at the MySQL Conference & Expo about our kickass MySQL Support Team. The topic was maybe unusual, but during these times of people unfairly putting us a bit in discredit, it was probably even more important to put us under the spotlights. We’re a bunch of nice, happy people working together to deliver our customers and community the best support. I talked about where we came from, how we do it, what tools we use, and what customers are saying about us.

Yesterday I moved around Santa Clara, San Jose and Cupertino using the light train (tram) and busses. Public transportation is actually very nice around here. For $5 you can take a Day Pass which moves you around ‘the valley’ on the VTA transporation network. Funny: most people thank the bus driver when they get off, just like in a taxi. Something I’ve been struggling with in Orlando was also bugging me again here in California.