Parallel with last years international PHP conference the folks at S&S organized a novelty: an open source database conference. It was a great success. We had people from most projects for end users to talk to: PostgreSQL, BerkleyDB, MySQL, SQLite, Apache Derby, HSQLDB, Firebird and MaxDB. I hope this year Ingres will also make it and maybe a few others I do not even know yet! For the projects themselves it was a great opportunity to sit down and discuss about the potential for cooperation. The conference will be held again, same time same place. So mark your calendar November 6th-8th opendbcon 2006 in Frankfurt germany.

The call for papers is still going on. So submit your topics ASAP. The plan is to have a wide range of topics that appeals to managers, developers/DBA's as well as hackers on the various projects. I am also hoping that there will be a large panel discussion.

Personally I will probably try to hand in a proposal derived from the thesis paper I am working on that discusses the relation between open source and commercial vendors. Hope to see you all there!

I expect this will be a very productive event. The OSS DBs have made such enormous strides in the last few years (as has OSS in general), and a gathering of the tribe offers a lot of opportunity for more progress.

By the way, Doug Burns' Oracle Blog mentions this in this week's Log Buffer.

Dave.