I’m pleased to announce that there will be the formal launch of Pythian Europe at the premises of the Canadian Embassy in Prague on Wednesday the 6th of August from 17:00 to 18:30. This historic event will be announced by Mrs. Sameena Qureshi, Trade Counsellor, Embassy of Canada; and Paul Vallée, President and Founder, The Pythian Group. Present will be various members from the press (IT and Business), as well as representatives from Oracle and Sun Microsystems, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Prague, and many more. We will prepare some unusual and very tasty snacks and refreshments.

We would love for readers of this blog to join us, so please consider this your special, personal invitation from me. Please come if you’re in Prague on Wednesday. If you plan to attend, please contact Dan at elbl@pythian.com.

Thanks to Paul for announcing the founding of Pythian Europe. Paul finished his blog by inviting me to tell you the story about “how we met Pythian”. Here it is.

As I get older, I am starting to see some symbolic links connecting significant moments of my life. I realize now that the link to Pythian started 20 years ago in Prague in the year 1988. Let me share with you the trip. Although in Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev began to moderate the totalitarian regime by introducing Perestrojka, the government of Czechoslovakia was still ruling with an iron hand.

I worked as a VMS administrator on a Czechoslovak clone of the VAX computer and, by the way, I became an expert in backup/restore, an expertise I had to exercise several times per week due to frequent crashes of our 29MB disks (also a East European clone). Besides administering VAX/VMS systems, I had to write hundreds of lines of Assembler, Fortran, and C code, just to handle inserts, updates, and queries for records in a few data files.

One day a colleague of mine brought me a tape, which he had smuggled from Vienna (there was an embargo on US software imports). On the back of the tape was written, “Oracle V4 for VAX/VMS.” Oracle V4 was released in 1984, the year I knew better as the title of the famous George Orwell novel. Out of curiosity I installed it after hours.

The “Readme1st” said to run one script with a strange extension — “.SQL”. Some program called UFI logged in as scott/tiger into a “database” and did SELECT * FROM EMP, DEPT WHERE EMP.DEPTNO=DEPT.DEPTNO AND DNAME = 'SALES', and then increased the salaries of all salesmen by 10% by one simple UPDATE command.

I was so fascinated that I spent the whole night playing with SQL, as I did on many evenings over the next two years. Once, after returning from a political demonstration in Old Town Square, I escaped back into my SQL world. Despite tanks running the crowds down and the imprisonment of the dissident Vaclav Havel, I perceived strongly that regime change was as inevitable as the victory of SQL.

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