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Open Query at MySQL Users Conference 2009

I’m not personally there this year, but Walter Heck will be. In case you haven’t met Walter yet, photo enclosed 😉

Photo of WalterHe’s a techie, like you, and he’d love to meet you and hear how you’re using MySQL and surrounding technologies and what things might make your life easier in terms of application architecture, development, deployment, maintenance, and so on.

This may or may not fit with the services that Open Query provides, but the key point is to listen, not sell. If there’s a good match, of course that’s fine too!

As a sidenote, just to pre-empt the inevitable question of “Arjen why are you not here?”: flying over to the US has always been fine, but coming back is a pile of grief every time taking multiple weeks to recover. I’ve never had that issue with for instance trips to Europe. That’s not just grief in terms of personal discomfort or lost work time, but it means my daughter really loses out on her papa for about 3 weeks.

Before I made the decision to note make the trip this year, I did enter various items into the session submission process months back – they didn’t get accepted, but I’m not unique in that respect. Many well known speakers from previous years did not get a slot this year. No worries. There’s plenty of things going on in the surroundings, including Sheeri’s game day and community conference and Percona’s performance sessions, as well as all the excellent encounters in the corridors and in the evenings.

Having been absent in 2007 as well, I would like to add a little bit of outside perspective on the event… while for this week everything appears to be focused on the conference (at least when you look at Planet MySQL), most MySQL users around the world will of course not be at the conf, and have the same needs like the rest of the year. I believe it’s really important to tell about insights and developments all year round, as well as being active in the various interaction media (such as forums, user groups and events).

Anyway, have a great time at the conference, and do have a chat with Walter!

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