Attending the MySQL Users Conference in 2006, I had one of the best days of my career. At the morning keynote, my name was called, and I found myself on stage, together with Markus Popp, Roland Bouman, and Rasmus Lerdorf, being awarded a Community Member of the year crystal ball. That day is permanently in my mind as a very fond memory.

For this reason, it is a particular pleasure for me to be in a position to suggest the next ones who will hold the community awards. It is a collegial decision, not my own. Each member of the community team submits a few names, we discuss the pros and the cons, and then we settle for the first three names in the list.

This year, the agreement fell on three names, who were included for different reasons.

Mosso the Rackspace Cloud now has a Drizzle developer image much like the first Drizzle AMI on EC2.

The Mosso interface is definitely different, it’s a GUI, and I definitely prefer CLI, but it’s a simpler navigation for a new user. I suspect an API may be available.

I had an issue with the backup process, more the lack of feedback. The Knowledge Base didn’t help, so both calling and Live Chat directed me ultimately to the same person. I also found a bug in the backup process, that is being able to select an incomplete backup to try and launch a new server. I talked to Support about and apparently already known.

And in true open source form, the Drizzle version is actually one point higher then yesterday’s AWS image.

There has been a lot of talk on the news about the swine flu and how it is spreading fast and a lot of people are affected. Here is something worth checking out, a google map with incidents marked with information on areas affected, how many dead, infection reported, etc.

http://tinyurl.com/cosuzr

Watch where you hang out and if you are feeling any symptoms, go see a doctor.

Here is some info from  wikipedia:

Mexican officials state that since March 2009 there have been over 1600 reported cases and put the death toll at 149, with 20 confirmed to be linked to a new swine influenza strain of …

This is really cool. Rackspace is hiring people to work on Drizzle full-time for their cloud product, Mosso. Adrian Otto writes the Drizzle mailing list:

I was speaking with Eric Day at the developer conference, and I mentioned that Rackspace is wiling to employ full time developers for the specific purpose of furthering the Drizzle project’s mission. He suggested that I email you on this list becuase he expected there would be interest in this offer. If you work on the project now part time, and want to make it a full time job working exclusively on the Drizzle project, let me know. The Rackspcae Cloud believes …

Given the current state of the economy, here's a quick job plug for anyone interested and qualified.

At the Drizzle Developer Day on Friday, I got to meet Adrian Otto from Rackspace. Rackspace has a cloud offering (think Aamazon EC2) that's called Mosso and is willing to employ full time developers who spend all their time working on Drizzle.

Here's what he sent to the mailing list.

I was speaking with Eric Day at the developer conference, and I mentioned that Rackspace is wiling to employ full time developers for the specific purpose of furthering the Drizzle project's mission. He suggested that I email you on this list becuase he expected there would be interest in this offer. If you work on the project now part time, and want to make it a full time job …

Simple and short: Please do not screw things up. We like MySQL, millions of people like MySQL. Keep it alive and healthy and we’ll love you for it. That is all.

Introduction The following instructions will lay out an installation of MySQL on Solaris using the MySQL Optimal Configuration Architecture (MOCA) for someone knowledgeable in MySQL/Solaris administration. MOCA is a set of best practices I put together to lay out a guidelines for installing and configuring a MySQL database server. MOCA is designed for someone with experience with MySQL,

Peter wrote about this recently, but I don’t know if it was really clear what was going on. Point One: Sphinx can be contacted by the MySQL protocol. Not “as a MySQL storage engine.” Not “from MySQL.” It understands the MySQL protocol itself. So from the protocol point of view, the Sphinx search daemon can look just like a MySQL server. Point Two: Sphinx understands a SQL-like query language. Don’t be fooled.