Singapore, the LUGS, and MySQL at SMU
In the last minute life of Colin, I managed to get a flight on Tuesday to head to Singapore for Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu Asian Business Tour, pretty much in the nick of time. It was a complete rush from getting the tickets, to reaching the hotel, and getting to the Singapore Management University (arrived only five minutes past!). The LUGS meets are large – going by the numbers, it seemed larger than what we have at LUV in Melbourne, and definitely greater than the MYOSS meetups.
Mark is an excellent speaker, who told us about Ubuntu’s place in the market, and all the cool things Canonical is doing to extend its reach. Being on a tight schedule, he didn’t stick around for after-talk discussions, but quite a number of other folk did. Harish Pillay (RH’s CTA in Singapore) had a couple of boxes of Fedora Core 4 giveaways, which a lot were pleased to snap up!
So I stuck around to have some dinner, and realised something interesting. The Singapore Management University (SMU), one of the four largest and renowned universities in Singapore, teach second year Computer Science database students, MySQL instead of MS SQL, commencing the year 2006.
I thought that was absolutely great news. Even Monash, a university deeply rooted in telling students that open source is better to use, where gcc is preferred over Visual Studio, still use Oracle for all their database teaching. Does anyone know of any other university using MySQL in their database teaching? I’d like to know (either comment here, or drop me e-mail).
(written a few weeks ago, without the Publish button being hit, mainly because photos weren’t uploaded yet. They’re now at: photos tagged SLUG)
UWA uses MySQL for its Databases course, however they then require you to write a fat java client as the frontend :-(
hey colin, when are you coming back to monash? are you coming back at all to australia??? :P