MySQL is a different from other OpenSource projects since it was started as a commercial AND OpenSource database developed by a company. Most other databases was either introduced by 'normal' proprietary commercial companies at the end of their commercial life or the result of university research.

This lead to some different goals since MySQL development was driven by production users from day one.

The main benefits of using MySQL are Speed, Robustness and Usability -- the three cornerstones valued by our users since Day Zero.

We have since added many features, such as Replication, Transactions, Row-level Locking -- always without compromising the fundamental cornerstones.

The talk with start with a short history of MySQL and then continue with a overview of MySQL including the internal stucture. Then we will continue with new features that have appeared in 4.0, and the features that will appear in 4.1 and 5.0.

With well over 10000 server downloads per day and an estimated 3 millions installations the MySQL Database system (TM) is one of the world's most used SQL databases.

Larry Wall has said on many occasions that the three virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris. Pixie is a perl-based object persistance framework designed to appeal to two of the three. The ubiquity of the relational database is near complete, and more of us who write object-oriented software are coming to terms with the unfortunate fact that the two technologies don't come together very well. While there are many object to RDBMS solutions out there, the majority of useful ones require that you write a schema that describes how the object looks to the database, and vice versa. Pixie takes a different, schema-less approach that leaves the development team with one less thing to worry about when the requirements change, as they inevitably will.

Tangram started off as an object-relational mapper for Perl. In other words, it lets you store objects in a conventional relational database, as if it were an object-oriented database.

Recently we have developed versions of Tangram that use XML files as a persistence medium. This new capability is available not only in Perl, but also in Java and C++. Moreover, Tangram is capable of saving its own schemas in XML form. As a result, Tangram makes it easy to share objects between applications written in different languages.

InCASE is a Universal Object Editor that uses the information captured in Tangram schemas to automatically create a graphical user interface for any business model, however complex. InCASE can serve as a visual front-end to any Tangram database. Since Tangram schemas can be persisted in XML databases, InCASE also serves as a schema editor.

Jacques will also present a suite of tools that have become core components of Eurocontrol's testing framework. These tools are based on InCASE and on Tangram for Perl, Java and C++. They make it easy to constitute, maintain and compare test databases.

The ERP5 community project aims at creating a set of Open Source / Free Software Components to implement a simple yet consistent entreprise resource management solution. ERP5 is being designed as a reliable solution for small and medium businesses as well as an development platform for advanced electronic commerce applications which require resource planning.

Jean-Paul Smets, CEO of Nexedi, will give a technical presentation of ERP5, with an emphasis on object persistence and queries in object databases.