This past week I attended OSCon, the annual conference for open source’s true believers. And there was a religous fervor in the air, particularly from the point of view of someone more accustomed to Oracle conferences.

And if open source is the religion, proprietary closed-source companies are the devil. That having been said, I was surprised how virtually all large companies were demonized. Even long-time defenders of open source like IBM were ignored at best. That didn’t prevent the from coming though, with Microsoft and HP in particular with high-profile sponsorships and PR offensives that didn’t seem to have much influence with the crowd.

The companies generating buzz were the small companies built around development of their own open source products. There are a surprising number of them out

The Helsinki MySQL User Group will meet at the usual place on May 29th. Click here for details and to RSVP. Linas Varbalas will talk about Tungsten and maybe dare a live demo!

Linas is in town for the OUGF Harmony conference 2012. The conference might of course be of some interest to user group members too. Due to the conference we also have other famous MySQLrs in town, Sheeri Kabral of OurSQLcast fame has also confirmed she will attend the user group (and maybe have OurSQLcast CD's with her?)

I have finally recovered from my trip to Santa Clara enough that I can scribble down some notes from this year's MySQL Conference. Writing a travel report is part of the deal where my employer covers the travel expense, so even if many people have written about the conference, I need to do it too. And judging from the many posts for instance from Pythian's direction, Nokia is perhaps not the only company with such a policy?

Baron's keynote

There has usually always been something that can be called a "soft keynote". Pirate Party founder Rick Falckvinge speaking at a database conference is a memorable example (I still keep in touch with him, having met him at the Hyatt Santa Clara). This year there was one less day, and therefore less keynotes. The soft keynote was therefore taken care of by Baron using some time out of Peter's opening keynote.

Day 1 is the fist official day of the Percona Live MySQL Conference; the day began with two mini-keynotes by Peter Zaitev and Baron Schwarz of Percona talking about the history of MySQL and how he got started in the open source movement respectively. Very nostalgic and I’m sure it brought a tear to a few people’s eyes.

Following the dynamic duo was full keynotes by followed by Mårten Mickos (Eucalyptus Systems) speaking on “Making LAMP a Cloud” and Brian Aker (HP) on “The New MySQL Cloud Ecosystem”. To be honest I found the full keynotes to be quite disappointing. For me the keynotes speeches should be about a topic that is visionary or notable in some way. What I got from the keynotes were:  MySQL is good, MySQL is growing, let me show you my product around MySQL, and buy/use my product. For me, they felt far more like

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012 is over. Together with the SkySQL solutions day, it has kept me occupied for 4 full days, from early morning to late at night.

I have to say that I am pleased. The quality of the organization was very high, with a very good lineup of speakers and an excellent technical support.

As usual, I have learned a lot during this week, either directly, by attending talks, or indirectly, by meeting people who told me what was juicy at the talks that I had missed. And I have met new interesting people, and caught up with the people that I know already.

This conference was particularly intense also because I got myself involved in 5 talks, which was probably more than I should have. How did

If you are following news regarding openSUSE and MySQL, you probably already know, that we have both MySQL and MariaDB in openSUSE to allow users to choose what they want to use. And if these two options are not enough, we’ve got server:database repository with newest and greatest development versions of both and MySQL Cluster on to of that. I think all this is great and awesome, that we have all of that.

Now to the not so great part. Unfortunately I’m bare human, I have to eat, sleep and I have some work, some bugs that takes a lot more time that I expected, some school duties to take care of and of course

Winners of the 2012 MySQL Community Awards were announced at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo just a few hours ago:

...

In terms of continuing with MySQL traditions, it has been my privilege the past years to be the secretary of the MySQL Community Awards panel. We have so many amazing persons, products and companies in this community. One of the nicest thing we can do to each other, and what really builds and fuels a community, is to show appreciation and say thanks to people that really deserve it.

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Here it is finally – the MySQL conference 2012 starts with the Keynote Sessions.

The first keynote speech is by Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona and a very smart guy and also by Baron Schwartz (Percona), another very smart guy, the brains behind a number of toolkits for MySQL. They’re talking about the MySQL Evolution – what I alluded to in my first post regarding this conference – they ways in which MySQL has grown, evolved, scaled and continues to make new inroads into new applications and industries.

From Peter: “What is most important hasn’t changed – MySQL is still a great piece of technology and it is evolving very rapidly” (Love that quote!) Also “MySQL is also buzzword compatible: NoSQL, BigData”

From Baron: his own

A very well attended Pedro’s dinner – I didn’t count, but we had 9 tables of 8-10 people or so – dare I say almost a 100 people? Lots of beer, margaritas and good conversations! Here are a few pictures from the event

Wow what a lot has changed since the last MySQL conference I blogged about in 2007

MySQL has been acquired twice, once as MySQL by Sun and the second time around bundled with Sun when Oracle bought Sun. The conference is no longer organized by O’Reilly but by Percona. And the MySQL database itself has changed – We were talking about new features in MySQL 5.1, which wasn’t released yet, along with Falcon (where did it go?). 5.1 has long since been released as has 5.5 and we’re now talking about 5.6 instead of 6.0. There was no “Cloud” on the horizon, nor was there MariaDB, XtraDB, Drizzle, Schooner or any of the other offshoots of MySQL, all of which are creating a new buzz around the product.

Yet one thing remains constant – the vibrant community around

The second week of April will be quite a busy one

Tuesday, April 10

April 10th is Tutorial day at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo.

On that day, I will present a classic: MySQL Replication 101. This is a topic traditionally presented by a MySQL engineer. However, since Oracle seems not to be eager to send anyone to the conference, I volunteered to the task, and I have let everyone know that, if Oracle change its mind and sends some engineers at the conference, I will happily have one of my former colleagues from the replication team as co-speaker.

Wednesday, April 11

The conference will be in full swing when the regular sessions (and the keynotes!) start. From my side,

Several months ago I suggested having lightning talks at Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012, and I also offered to help.

Then I forgot about that for a while, until I saw the announcement that there was a call for Lightning Talks. Great! I submitted two proposals, and asked my colleagues to do the same, and also encouraged many good speakers I know to submit something.

The deadline for lightning talks submission passed, and I was told that my offer to help had been accepted, and I was in charge of lightning talks! OK. I would have preferred being told before the CfP, but an offer to help is an offer to help, and thus I went through the motions of evaluating the talks, sending notices to the winners, consoling the losers, and giving hope to the few brave ones who will replace the

Today I'm coming out of the closet. Since I'm a professional database expert I try to be like the mainstream and use the commercial MySQL forks (including MySQL itself). But I think those close to me have already known for some time that I like community based open source projects. I cannot deny it any longer, so let me just say it: I'm a Drizzle contributor and I'm very much engaged!

I've been eyeing the Drizzle project since it started in 2008. Already then there were dozens of MySQL hackers for which this project was a refuge they instantly flocked to. Finally a real open source project based on MySQL code that they could contribute to, and they did. It was like a breath of fresh air in a culture that previously had only accepted one kind of relationships: that between an employer and an employee. Drizzle was more liberal. It accepted also forms of engagement already common in most other

This post complements Henrik's Call for Nominations for 2012 MySQL Community Awards.

Recap: we keep the tradition of awarding MySQL community members for their notable contributions to the MySQL ecosystem.

Previously, the awards were given by MySQL AB/Sun. Later on they were given by the community itself, as will follow this year, when the awards are presented during the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, this April.

Henrik describes in details the three categories: community contributor, application, corporate contributer -of the year.

A bit more about the categories

To add to Henrik's description of the categories, keep in mind the