Friendly reminder that public nominations for MySQL Community Awards 2013 are open for another week. Please nominate persons, applications or companies/organizations that you think deserve it.

For inspiration, you may want to refresh your memory about winners from past years. They are all listed in the table below. Trivia: Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP and inventor of the SQL LIMIT clause is a winner of this award.

read more

It is a new year and it's time again to start thinking of all the great people and companies that make the MySQL ecosystem so great. It is time to start thinking of this year's MySQL Community Awards.

Last year we had a record number of winners, eleven goblets were handed out! But behind the scenes things were even more exciting, there were several ties that forced the panel to do extra tie-breaking voting rounds. In one category we even had a 6-way tie! All of this just testifies to how much is happening in the MySQL world nowadays.

read more

I'm happy to report the release of the program schedule for the next Percona Live event, April 2013.

While you can see there are still some "TODO"s, and minor scheduling changes still to go, the overall reviewing process is complete, and the schedule is sound.

The committee has reviewed over 250 submissions in total, sessions and tutorials. It took two months to review the sessions and finalize the schedule. There were very good submissions, and it wasn't till I started building the schedule that I realized just how many.

You know the feeling: you're at a conference, and there's this time slot where you just can't make up your mind which session

There are a few interesting learning resources recently created by activists in the MySQL community. I just wanted to link to them to spread the word. They are free and if you've been looking for a way to learn more about MySQL, you should have a look at these.

MySQL Marinate

This is something I haven't really seen done before (for MySQL): a virtual self study group. It is based on the idea of everyone reading the same book, and I assume Sheeri will then facilitate some commentary on what your read. Sheeri mentioned this in a blog post earlier, but yesterday I went to check the signup page and wow - there are already 117 (or 76, depending on whether you look to the left or to the right) students registered!

read more

On Monday afternoon, Neal Armitage and I will be speaking at Percona Live in London. It will be a three hours tutorial about Tungsten replicator.

The contents of this tutorial are mostly new. We have released recently a new and easier way of installing different topologies, in the shape of cookbook scripts, which are distributed with the replicator tarball.

Using this cookbook, any user can simply install multiple topologies, from the simple master/slave to all-masters, fan-in, and star.

There are recipes for showing the replication cluster, switching roles between master and a chosen slave, taking over MySQL replication, installing direct slaves with parallel replication, testing each topology, and

The Winter season for conferences is catching up speed.

DOAG

As I write this the DOAG conference in Germany is happening. It is one of the biggest (or the biggest?) Oracle user group conferences outside of USA. Many of my European friends in the MySQL space are talking there. As you know I have been a big fan of Galera Cluster for MySQL for over a year now, but I was perhaps a bit of an early adopter. Lo-and-behold, I was surprised to see the DOAG related press-release from SkySQL puts the creators of Galera first in their headline: Codership, SkySQL und weitere Top-Experten rund um das Thema ‘MySQL Datenbanken” in Nürnberg

I had an interesting conversation with Sheeri (who I’ve known for many years, so consider this friendly banter) on Twitter about my recent blog post titled: once again, a split in events.

Disclaimer/Bias Warning: For those that don’t know me, I write this as a perspective of a community member. I was the first ever Community Engineer at MySQL, followed by being a Community Relations Manager right up till I left Sun Microsystems. I now work on MariaDB which is a branch of MySQL, so naturally we are in competition for user base. But I’m writing this as a community member at large who cares about MySQL & the ecosystem.

First of, this is a focus

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the Tutorials Schedule for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, 2013.

This schedule comes as the outcome of hard work put by the reviewing committee members. Thanks! This work is much appreciated!

We got a good number of submissions. We've also reached out to prominent speakers and companies we felt would give great tutorials. All were reviewed, rated, discussed, compared; re-reviewed; some required further feedback from speakers.

Thank you to all speakers for submitting their proposals! I'm very sorry if your tutorial didn't make it through -- we have good tutorials left out -- there's only so much time in one day!

What  [Read more...]

Within hours of my post about meeting the MySQL community in Barcelona, we got several offers to help, and within one day, an event was created and agreed upon.

Thanks!

Today the event was posted at Evenbrite. It will take place on Tuesday, November 13th, at 7pm. It will be a one hour talk about State of the art in MySQL high availability and replication, followed by one hour of Q&A, networking, beer, and snacks.

Registration is necessary, because the seats are limited. If you want to attend, you should register as soon as possible!

Update: With the enthusiastic responses that we have received from Barcelona, there is now an event defined at Evenbrite. If you are in Barcelona on November 13th, please register!

My company, Continuent, will have an engineering meeting in Barcelona, Spain, from November 11th to 16th.

We are meeting because, as we all work from home, we need to get in touch face-to-face at least a few times a year, and every time we try choosing a nice, inspiring place where we can both work and relax. This time, the choice went to Barcelona, which happens to be one of my favorite towns.

Now comes the community. We build software that is mainly directed to MySQL users (although we also dedicate much effort to replication to and from Oracle, Postgres,

It's the time of the year again: You have 2 more weeks to submit a great proposal to the biggest and baddest MySQL Conference: Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (Santa Clara). Like many things in the MySQL community, this conference has also gone through a transformation over the past 3 years. But last year the growing pains and uncertainty ended with Percona putting up a great show. Attendance was up again (over 1000) and there was a sense of energy and excitement for the future of MySQL. If you are like me and like to dwell in nostalgia (so that you can get into the right mood for submitting great proposals) my coverage of last year's conference is found here: part 1,

Simon Phipps, who's Computer World UK blog isn't aggregated on Planet MySQL, has a blog post which reveals the truth behind the missing MySQL test cases that many of us commented on some time ago (including myself). You can read Simon's blog post here.

As you remember, there were various things that happened (or rather ceased to happen) during the Summer which led to people complaining that Oracle's MySQL is closing down. As a result of the uproar, source code trees at Launchpad were immediately refreshed. Otoh, there was never any public explanation why test cases for new bug fixes are withheld.

read more

After a long pause in the speaking game, I am back.

It's since April that I haven't been on stage, and it is now time to resume my public duties.

• I will speak at MySQL Connect in San Francisco, just at the start of Oracle Open World, with a talk on MySQL High Availability: Power and Usability. It is about the cool technology that is keeping me busy here at Continuent, which can make life really easy for DBAs. This talk will be a demo fest. If you are attending MySQL Connect, you should see it!
• A happy return for me. On October 27th I will talk about open source databases and the pleasures of command line operations at

• Services and management, with Ronald Bradford, with whom we have crossed paths several times, first in the MySQL community activities, then as colleagues at MySQL AB, and again in community cyberspace.
• Development, with Ludovic Launer, a senior developer with a long experience in development and software architecture. This is an excellent injection of new blood for our development team.
• Sales, with Robert Noyes, who has worked in enterprise sales for 25 years, and comes at the right moment to reinforce our business in the moment of its biggest growth that I have seen since I joined the company.

I promised to still post some general comments about the MySQL ecosystem, to conclude my outlook of State of the MySQL forks and Drizzle. I will do this now in the form of answering questions I got in the comments, twitter and some that I make up just myself.

Oracle has not stopped updating bzr trees

read more

I got several comments and questions on my previous blog "The State of the MySQL forks". One question was "Why didn't you mention Drizzle?" So I will say something about Drizzle here before concluding with other remarks.

So why didn't you mention Drizzle?

Mainly because the post was already long and also I had to wrap up and call into a meeting.

read more

It's been some time since I last wrote an overview of the state of the MySQL forks, but the last few weeks have been eventful enough that it is a good time to again see how the competing variants are positioned against each other.

I have written on this topic 1-2 times a year. Here are links to the previous overviews:

Map of MySQL forks and branches (2010)
The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating (2010)
Observations on Drizzle and PostgreSQL
Percona.tv: State of the MySQL

• Oracle Makes More Moves To Kill Open Source MySQL
• Oracle now destroying MySQL
• Is MySQL Slowly Turning Closed Source?

Is Oracle really consciously and willingly killing MySQL?

I don't think so.

Is Oracle damaging MySQL by taking the wrong steps? Probably so.

This is my personal opinion, and AFAIK there is no official statement from Oracle on this matter, but I think I can summarize the Oracle standpoint as follows:

• There is a strong and reasonable concern about security.