I wish I had better notes, but I was enthralled by Jonathan Schwartz’s (CEO, President, Sun Microsystems) keynote. It was truly, very amazing an influential. He’s a great speaker, and very motivated (and I think he’s motivated a lot of the audience).

What is Sun’s Agenda?
Similar values, cultures, and similar dysfunction’s like any family.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center - 500 teraflop “open” super-comptuing facility.

“Computational science is the third mode of discovery, complementing physical experimentation and theory” — Daniel Atkins III, Director, Office of Cyberinfrastruture, National Science Foundation

The industry has valid, legitimate scientific purpose.

Improving society as a result of that understanding. What does it take to fuel developing economies? Or to make new scientific discoveries?

In Africa, a bank is giving mobile phones, to allow folk to …

Yes, late post... had to sort out and upload my photos first, so others beat me to it with their blog. My take...

So there was a MySQL Community Dinner Sunday night. People kept saying I organised it, but really I only did the initial blog post and set up a wiki page, the rest arranged itself: over 50 people came to the restaurant. And there was this guy in jeans/t-shirt with long hair lingering near the front door, who conspicuously looked like someone whose face I'd seen online somewhere. Jay and I went back outside to invite him in.



So, I had a very nice chat with Jonathan Schwartz, and I now reckon he actually understands Open Source and community. This includes his approach to the meeting and general demeanor. He got it right. Well done and thanks, Jonathan. Above is Paul Vallee (Pythian Group) talking with him. (I …

Live blogging from Marten Mickos’ (SVP Database Group) keynote at the MySQL Conference and Expo 2008.

Why did Sun acquire us?
The culture and the vision. Biggest match with Sun. “Network is the computer” and “Best Online Database”. Great affinity.

Its a 1 billion dollar vote for the LAMP stack.

Integrating better with OpenOffice.org, run better with Glassfish, and so on. Now, performance and scaling is number one, to make databases run faster. It will take time, but it will be very positive.

This conference itself is just as big as LinuxWorld was seven years ago.

An amazing photo of burning the IPO Prospectus - a bonfire in Santa Cruz. Getting rid of the past!

Scale exponentially, but keep the cost growth at a linear scale. World is flat - build your software in Russia, China, etc. and deploy elsewhere even. Fail fast? Remember to scale fast.

If the whole world is …

2008 MySQL Application of the Year
Social Network - MySQL powered with over 70 million active users (Facebook)
Mobile operator - Highly available LAMP platform at the heart of SMS, mobile and CRM applications (Virgin Mobile France)
eCommerce site - Built caching tier using MySQL for 4 billion transactions per day (eBay)

2008 MySQL Partner of the Year
Open source backup solution (Zmanda)
Expanding support for open source (Microsoft)
Leading reseller (Computercenter)

2008 MySQL Community Member of the Year
Code Contributor (Baron Schwartz)
Quality Contributor (Diego Medina)
Community Advocate (Sheeri Kritzer Cabral (again!))

…

Announced this morning is this year’s MySQL award winners.

2008 MySQL Application of the Year

• FaceBook - Social Network
• Virgin Mobile France - Mobile Operator
• eBay - ECommerce Site

2008 MySQL Partner of the Year

• Zmanda
• Microsoft
• Computer center

2008 MySQL Community Member of the Year

• Baron Schwartz - Code Contributor www.xaprb.com
• Diego Medina - Quality Contributor www.fmpwizard.com
• Sheeri Kritzer Cabral Communicate Advocate www.sheeri.com

In-between Marten’s keynote, Rich Green, EVP Software, Sun Microsystems, comes up on stage, and here’s my live-blog.

He talked about the famous dinner last year, for buying MySQL. Autonomy reigns supreme in MySQL. MySQL continue at their same course and speed. The plan is the plan, until there is a new plan - and there is no new plan.

Sun has a heterogeneous platform. Many partners, including Dell, IBM, Intel, and so on. Lots of open source in terms of software. The cultures, discourse, intellectual arguments, its an excellent mash up, this Sun and MySQL. Don’t Panic! There is no change for what has been an incredibly successful thing.

Sun’s Continued MySQL Commitment:

• profitable business on the principles of FOSS
• GPL - consider GPLv3 as it involves, and we understand the interest and evolution of the community. Its GPLv2 still, naturally
• Tuning for the most popular operating …

Unsolicited feedback I heard once again... conf attendees really don't like the breakfast offering.
The coffee/tea is good, but the food is... well, mostly not something people regard as breakfast nutrition.

Rich Green talking at MySQL UserConf.

Dot point 2: GPL.

Let’s see….

Marten has opened the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo this morning in Santa Clara.

What was funny in the early slides was the photo showing the burning of the IPO Prospectus. Marten mentioned now with many Sun lawyers in the audience he has to be more careful what to say.

This morning while coming down for breakfast, a Sun employee entered the lift. I introduced myself, and he indicated he knew me by name. When I asked what department he was in, he said “legal”. Being intrigued as to who he knew me, I’d discovered he has read my emails and blog posts.

I must admit I’ve met a number of new people this week and the first word has been “Oh!”, as in they have heard of my name previously.

These have been unexpected responses and information for me, I’m not normally surprised like this. I’ll not be changing what I say, and how I say it, professionally my writing and publishing will continue to embody …

There are quite a few business angles you might see only if you’re here at the conference, and you won’t get from blogs. For example, let’s take a look at the contents of the shoulder bags they hand out with your registration. (This is only a partial list.)

• SnapLogic’s flyer gets it right: their system is compatible with “GNU Linux.” Hooray, a commercial company acknowledging the GNU operating system for what it is!
• MySQL Enterprise’s flyer has three big bullet points: MySQL Load Balancer, MySQL Connection Manager, and MySQL Enterprise Monitor Query Analyzer. The first two look like they’re probably built on MySQL Proxy. The last has a visual explain plan feature, which according to an elevator conversation is not yet built. I’ll stop by their booth and see. As you may know, Maatkit has provided a tool (which is designed for integration into other tools) …