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I’m off to do some MySQL training in Asia for the rest of the month. One week in Singapore, one week (and the weekend) in Bangalore.

Correction, Asia and the Emerging Markets. Apparently thanks to phenomenal growth, China and India have left Asia in the last few years (in our corporate parlance).

Always good to check flight status before you head to the airport, even (especially?) at 7am when you just checked 6 hours before. I now have 5 extra hours in beautiful John F Kennedy Airport, terminal 7. I haven’t seen the new JetBlue terminal, but this one almost makes JFK feel like a major international airport.

Cathay Pacific seems a fine airline, though perhaps technically challenged. The self-service kiosks were all down, and my plane is somewhere between here & Canada… but they gave me $25 to get breakfast & lunch plus a calling card while I wait! If the promise of "outlets for everyone" is true, I’ll give them a full thumbs-up.

Bike month ends this weekend in the city, so I felt I had to bike to work at least once – it was great! Brooklyn to 101 Park (the Sun NY office) – six miles in just under a half hour.
My route, for those interested:

It’s a perk to having an office that I’d forgotten – I was a lot more awake than I usually am when I first sit at my keyboard. No bike parking or showers at 101 Park, but  those great friends of the bike commuter, talc and baby wipes, spruced me up nicely on arrival.

My first day was over a month ago (depending on how you reckon it – I count by when I was “onboarded” in Burlington, MA in late March), but I am finally settled in enough to have a Sun blog. It’s been quite a ride.

This could (and may) be the subject of many posts in this space, but I thought I would start this one with some observations of what it is like going from a smallish company (MySQL was ~60 when I started and ~400 when we were acquired) to a largish one (Sun is close to 34,000 today).

Sun is big. I remember a statistic from 9th grade physics that the number of basketballs you can fit in the Earth is roughly the same as the number of Earths you can fit in our local star. I think there is a similar ratio for the number of MySQLs (offices, people, servers, etc) you can fit in the terrestrial Sun.

Some interesting first-month facts:

• My local office (ok, it is New York City) is significantly larger than MySQL’s largest – I’d wager about the size of the top five MySQL offices combined.
• The local Systems Engineering team (see prior disclaimer) is exactly the size of my globa SE team
• My new employer’s largest product was in Manhattan two weeks after I started – they needed to close the Holland Tunnel to get it there.

Is it going well? Am I itchy to jump ship?

I’m listening to the comforting clicks of my Sun keyboard sending keystrokes to my SunRay 2, with the dogs sleeping over on the couch in my Clinton Hill home. My team is still hitting it’s targets, my company is the largest contributor of Ope n Source software of it’s size (still), we are regularly dismissed by our larger competitors and shredded on Slashdot for the business model we pursue. Business as usual, except the targets are getting bigger, the competitors massive, the critics more shrill.

Pass the Kool-aid.