Marketcetera obtains funding. Microsoft posts additional protocol docs. Sun announces MySQL 5.1. (and more)

Marketcetera Closes $4 Million Series A Financing Led by Shasta Ventures, Marketcetera (Press Release)

Microsoft Publicly Posts Additional Protocol Documentation, Microsoft (Press Release)

Sun Microsystems Announces MySQL 5.1, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Sun Celebrates Third-Party MySQL Storage Engines, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

…

Also in the MySQL Press Releases today but dated for tomorrow is Sun Microsystems Announces MySQL 5.1.

I find the wording clearly a new language from my previous understanding — “pending general availability of MySQL? 5.1″.

We now see the trademark notice, obviously a Sun influence.
We now have a “pending” GA version. MySQL is obviously very keen to release MySQL 5.1 for GA. This was expected at last years’ MySQL conference. Many in the past year have expected this prior to this year’s conference (we are now being informed late Q2 2008). There was an anticipation there would be two RC versions, this is now the third. So what exactly does “pending” mean? Will 5.1.24 be renamed Production if it passes community acceptance (I say community because it’s not an Enterprise release). This would be a …

Our third keynote this morning was by Dr Werner Vogels - CTO Amazon.com

His second question to the audience “How many of you don’t shop at Amazon?” When one or two people raised their hands he commented, “Can I talk to you later.”

He was here to talk about Amazon as the technology company, forget about shopping. Think about the technology that drives that. There were some large and impressive numbers about Amazon. The one stood out was 3.9M shipments for peak day (didn’t mention which day)

Some points from the session.

• Some Big News — Persistence Storage for Amazon EC2
• Amazon started as technology consumer, we are now a technology provider.
• We were enterprise scale, now we are at web scale.
• Taking the approach, get big fast, the result was every architectural principle was broken.
• Moving into Software as a Service
• Develop …

You have to have been living under a rock, if you did not know that today is the first day of MySQL Users’ Conference and Expo. We at Zmanda are so proud and privileged to have been awarded the “Partner of The Year”. The award is very meaningful to our vision of Simplified, Easy to use, commercial Open Source Backup and Recovery. We appreciate the award and are committed to making the life of the MySQL DBA hassle free. We have had a ton of visitors from all walks of MySQL user community talk to us today. Its fascinating to talk to customer and prospects on how they leverage the power of MySQL. To learn more about how Zmanda provides the Best in Class Backup and Recovery solution for MySQL, you can attend Zmanda’s sessions at the MySQL Conference & Expo include:
What: “Radically Simple Backup & Recovery for Live MySQL”
Who: Chander Kant, Zmanda CEO and founder
When: …

At Day 1 of the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo today, our high numbers of attendees (reported at 2,000) have resulted in Standing Room only in a lot of talks. This has got to be excellent PR.

I got to sit in on the Memcached and MySQL session by Brian Aker and at the end I stuck my head in to Best Practices for Database Administrators by and Explain demystified by Baron Schwartz both 2008 MySQL Award winners.

All full to overfilling presentations.

It's my first time here and it is really nice. I find it interesting to see so many people interested in MySQL.

Whew! Today was the first 'production' day of certification exams at the Users Conference. We also had a Q&A Session where we gave out door prizes to just about everyone present.

Tomorrow we start at 9am, another

We still have some folks that need their Pearson VUE registration to come through the system before we can enter their grades (Hopefully after 9PM Pacific) but here are the preliminaries:

ID Exam Grade
2715 DBA-I pass
2715 DBA-II pass
3824 DBA-I pass
3824 DBA-II pass
4774 DBA-II pass
5688 DBA-I pass
5903 Cluster pass
7042 DBA-I fail
7075 DBA-I pass
7424 Developer-II pass
7529 DBA-I pass
7875 Developer-II pass
8459 Developer-I fail
8874 Developer-I fail
9122 DBA-I fail
9127 CMA pass
9127 DBA-I pass
9152 DBA-I pass
9176 DBA-I fail
9176 DBA-II fail …

At the MySQL Conference & Expo this week, Marten Mickos showed a slide in his keynote presentation of a recent ceremonial "S-1 burning" that took place on the beach in Santa Cruz.  The S-1 is the document filed when a company goes public with the SEC.  MySQL put a lot of effort into preparing the S-1 and getting ready to go public over the last year or so, working with auditors, creating the prospectus, lining up the bankers, the lawyers and all of that.  We were literally weeks away from filing when Marten had his dinner with Jonathan Schwartz who asked about acquiring the company in late november. 

So the S-1 burning was a little bittersweet especially for CFO Dennis "the fox" Wolf (right) and VP Finance Jeff "in socks" West (middle) who had put so much time into the preparation.  Also the photo …

First of all, thank you, Jay Pipes, for setting up the Bayshore Room tomorrow between 10am and 2pm, for Julian Cash to take pictures of us!

Second, I am a big fan of descriptive subject headers. So I thought I could promote this memorable event even more explicitly than what Jay did in his posting “Yes, It’s That Time of the Year Again…“.

It’s Julian’s fault that I bought my 8mm Sigma lens. He has one, and takes weird pictures with it. As opposed to mine, his are good (yup, he uses fancy high-tech equipment like flashes, and white background paper — one day I’ll go there, too).

This is MySQL’s very own Brian Aker, as distorted by Julian.

The new thing Julian is doing is Light Painting. This means he creates …

Joe Stump, Lead Architect, Digg. Slides should make its way at Joe’s website soon enough.

Mainly works on the backend, makes sure its scalable, can all the Digg buttons be served, et al.

Application layer is loosely coupled from your data. Whole point of SOA? You can put a service in front of the DB, and move between DB’s if required.

They do use MySQL, but its pretty vanilla.

Old habits die hard
- Data requests are sequential (I need foo, bar, bleh, ecky)
- Data requests are blocking (When you need foo, nothing else is happening)
- Tightly coupled (mysql_query, and if you’re using DB abstraction layer even, you’re still using SQL… you then can’t use CouchDB for instance)
- Scaling is not abstracted (a lot of caching are in the front end code. Its a problem when you start scaling your teams out). They …