I've been in Santa Clara, California this last week photographing the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo. This is the fourth year that I've been the official photographer for this conference. Wow, has it really been that many years in a row? I guess it has. Of course, there was one big difference this year: MySQL is now part of Sun Microsystems.

As part of the transition, Mårten Mickos (pictured above, and who is one of those guys the camera loves) has traded in his CEO title for the title of Senior Vice President of the Database Group at Sun. All the other MySQL folks have similarly changed titles, but so far, they don't seem to have changed roles much. If anything, they all seemed remarkably well relaxed and content this year. Of course, I guess I would be as well if I was a party to a one billion dollar acquisition. I hope that the terms of the deal ended up quite favorably to all of the employees of the former MySQL AB.

Over the years, the number of exhibitors on the expo floor have ebbed and flowed. This was certainly a banner year as it seemed like there were more exhibitors than ever and there were several times that the expo floor were jammed packed. And, this was the first year that I had some decent light in the expo hall. I guess that at some point in the last year, the Santa Clara Convention Center replaced some of the light bulbs in the exhibition areas with stronger ones.

During the conference, I got to meet up with several old friends. I didn't get to spend much time with Ask Bjørn Hansen this time around, but Pınar and I did go out to dinner with Dick Hardt and spend some time talking about travels, technology, identity, and fast cars.

I also had the pleasure of running into my very good friend, Jim Driscoll, who I used to work with at Sun Microsystems back when I worked on many things Java. I bumped into him walking through the hallways one day and I think we were both surprised and pleased. He hadn't planned on being at the conference, but got pulled into doing some time in the Sun booth in the Expo. I bumped into him right at the lunch break, so we were able to play hooky for an hour or so and catch up on life and such.

I so love those kind of surprises.

All in all, I uploaded 106 photos from the conference to Flickr for public viewing, all processed with Aperture 2.1 and uploaded with FlickrExport.