Disclaimer: This is my fourth year at ZendCon.  Although I spoke last year, this year I took a more active role in being the front man for the Unconference.  Special thanks to DevZone Editor and Zend Community Manager Cal Evans for his willingness in accepting my application for the job. ;)

Day Zero of ZendCon has always been Tutorials.  You bring your laptop, camp out for three hours, and see what you can learn.

One of the announcements during the MySQL Conference last week was IBM's new partnership with MySQL on using DB2 as a backend. In some of the initial accounts, they seemed to gloss over some of the aspects and implications, so I thought I'd cover them here.

First of all, the entire IBM iSeries - previously called AS400 - has been a popular stack to deploy. I happen to know of a number of companies around DC that have invested $M's into their stacks and applications and no matter what other tools become available, they're not going to switch. As a result, there are a huge number of DB2 instances out there that won't disappear for five or even ten years if not longer.

This is my wrapup of the 2007 MySQL conference. If you want to check out the day by day coverage, it's available here: Day One, Day Two, and Day Three.

First of all, I have to thanks Lenz Grimmer for his invitation to dotProject to attend the conference. Without MySQL's willingness to be involved in the community and Lenz's personal efforts, the whole thing would not have been possible.

This is my coverage of the third and final day of the 2007 MySQL Conference. Day One and Day Two were discussed previously. The images below were taken by James Duncan Davidson.

The third day of my attendance at the 2007 MySQL Conference began with a lively keynote from some guy called Rasmus who is touted to be "the father of PHP". Since PHP is not a biological entity, I pretty sure this is either metaphorical or a blatant lie. If I find out which, I'll let you know.

This is my coverage of the second day of the 2007 MySQL Conference which was written during the third day. Day One was discussed previously.

The entire exhibit floor opened quietly this day. The traffic and interest of the attendees had changed quite a bit. The first day, everyone is simply roaming around finding out what's there. The second day, the bulk of the people don't come back. They've had their curiosity satisfied and they only come in to get the free stuff. But the interesting thing is that the remaining people have completely different goals.

Although this is the first day of my attendance and coverage, there was actually one day of tutorials prior.

The first day of the 2007 MySQL Conference began with setting up the exhibit booth for dotProject. The booth was manned by myself, one of our great users - Trevor White from Ben's Ranch, Inc. - and occassionally even the project leader of dotProject, none other than Adam Donnison. With little to no budget, we took a very minimalist route and kept it simple with a few computers and a simple verbal explanation and demo. Adam also brought a bit of dotProject swag from CafePress. Despite not having a large logo'd banner, the swag had quotes that consistently made people chuckle and stop to find out what/who we were. Since we were positioned one station from the main door and were the second group in the Dot Org pavilion, we had a huge amount of foot traffic.

In case you've missed my previous 38 announcements, I will be one of a team of three representing dotProject at the MySQL Conference in the dotOrg Pavillion.

It's the first time that we've had an "official" presence and has led us to gather and compile information that we've never had to before. It has been a great chance for us to do some mental house cleaning and get things in order to get a coherent message an hit the points we want and need. We will have demo systems, informational sheets, and contact information on some of the companies providing professional support. This is yet another opportunity for the people who write the tools to meet with the people who use the tools. What could be better?