The First Meeting of the Belarus Java User Group Featured Experts from MySQL

by Alex KhizhniakFebruary 14, 2008

During the meetup, Java and MySQL developers discussed the community's latest updates and shared technical expertise.

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Bringing together the Java community

The first meeting of the Belarus Java User Group was held on February 7, 2008, at the Belarusian State University in Minsk, Belarus (Eastern Europe). Speakers from MySQL, the world’s most popular open-source database vendor, conducted the presentations on Connector/J for Java, as well as MySQL Cluster and replication.

62 Java developers were able to attend the conference, while the organizers received more than 120 registrations. Altoros, a global software delivery acceleration company, and Apatar, a provider of open-source tools for data integration, were proud to organize the event.

“We didn’t expect such a great amount of attendee submissions and were pleasantly surprised,” said Alex Khizhniak, the chairman and co-founder of the Belarus Java User Group. “It shows that there is a strong interest in the activity of the Java community in Belarus. We do hope to go further and make our JUG meetings a regular thing. I would also like to thank our colleagues from MySQL for taking the time to visit Minsk, and for their brilliant presentations and interaction with the audience.”

The meeting highlights

Alexander Nozdrin, Software Developer at MySQL AB, kicked off the conference at 5:45 p.m. with a demo that showed how to gain access to MySQL databases from Java using the Connector/J driver, describing a number of methods for providing performance tuning. Mr. Nozdrin also spoke about scalability and architecture problems.

After that, Serge Kozlov, QA Developer at MySQL, delivered an energetic presentation on MySQL Cluster with a detailed report on replication. The presentation was so well-received that Mr. Kozlov was held over his allotted time by the numerous questions presented by his intrigued audience.

“In my opinion, the first conference of the Belarus Java User Group was a success,” added Serge Kozlov, QA Developer (MySQL AB), one of the keynote speakers. “We appreciate how user group meetings like that contribute to community growth and strong relations within it. Communication is also of great importance to us, MySQL’s developers, therefore it was essential to get the feedback and learn more about the interests of MySQL users. We would like to wish Belarus Java User Group success in organizing future conferences and are looking forward to coming to Minsk once again.”

Presentations at the conference were an hour-long, followed by 15 minutes of Q&A sessions during coffee breaks. The conference was over at 9 p.m., which also marked the beginning of the after-party held at a popular Minsk coffee bar.

Alex Khizhniak is Director of Technical Content Strategy at Altoros and a cofounder of a local Java User Group. Managing distributed teams since 2004, he has gained experience as a journalist, an editor-in-chief, a technical writer, a technology evangelist, a project manager, and a product owner. Alex is obsessed with AI/ML, data science, data integration, ETL/DWH, data quality, databases (SQL/NoSQL), big data, IoT, and BI. The articles and industry reports he created or helped to publish reached out to 3,000,000+ tech-savvy readers. Some of the pieces were covered on TechRepublic, ebizQ, NetworkWorld, CIO.com, etc. Find him on Twitter at @alxkh.