While I can not consider myself a member of MySQL's community of developers, I've been watching those developments the same way I follow the development of Linux and many of the Java and Apache projects our own services depend on. It was great to meet many of the core members of the development community and get some insight into their thoughts about the future.

Baron Schwartz called in his Percona Performance Conference keynote on Thursday for a new, active MySQL community to take the driver's seat in the development of the database, not just in the incremental improvements way of bug fixing and performance improvement, but also by setting a vision for the next generation …

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.

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.

I decided to give a try to slideshare. So I uploaded the slides from my most recent talks, and will eventually catch up with the old ones. My slides repository is http://www.slideshare.net/datacharmer.

If you are looking for the slides from MySQL Conference 2009, here are the shortcuts:

• MySQL 5.1 Partitions tutorial
• MySQL 5.1 event scheduler
• Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• …

I decided to give a try to slideshare. So I uploaded the slides from my most recent talks, and will eventually catch up with the old ones. My slides repository is http://www.slideshare.net/datacharmer.

If you are looking for the slides from MySQL Conference 2009, here are the shortcuts:

• MySQL 5.1 Partitions tutorial
• MySQL 5.1 event scheduler
• Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• …

I decided to give a try to slideshare. So I uploaded the slides from my most recent talks, and will eventually catch up with the old ones. My slides repository is http://www.slideshare.net/datacharmer.

If you are looking for the slides from MySQL Conference 2009, here are the shortcuts:

• MySQL 5.1 Partitions tutorial
• MySQL 5.1 event scheduler
• Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• …

If MySQL's core server development and release process has been somewhat of a frustration to the userbase over the past few years, clearly another part of the ecosystem has thrived in ways which brought exciting fruit to the Expo part of this year's conference. MySQL has become a hub of innovation in both transactional and analytics databases in ways which have turned many of my concerns to enthusiasm.

I've already discussed the technologies for data analytics on MySQL, in particular Infobright's storage engine technology. This year I took the opportunity to learn a bit more about their appliance-based competitor Kickfire as well, and it certainly looks like a solid product. I still don't completely understand what the "SQL chip" in their appliance does, but certainly the combination of a special-purpose columnar …

I’m writing this entry on my way back to Tokyo from Narita. So, I was in the US all week for MySQL UC, Percona Performance Conference and the Drizzle Developer Day. It was great to meet new people and also catch up with developer friends from all over the world. These events are great excuse to bring together folks that work together online and receive the free beers that were promised on IRC. Looking back, the week just flew! I can’t believe I’m back in Japan already.

What wasn’t pleasant however was Drizzle being introduced as “MySQL Drizzle” and described as MySQL’s technology incubator at the opening keynote. The truth is, Drizzle is a community driven project that is not affiliated with any commercial organization. The project is …

The development model for MySQL Enterprise took a big step forward with the new community process Karen Padir announced in her Tuesday keynote. This is great for both the open source server as well as enterprise customers, because the closer the tie between the community and the development path, the better the quality and faster the progress towards new functionality. I'm not entirely sure everyone at Sun still completely understands why a working community process is a benefit for the enterprise customer base, but I'm happy steps are made in the right direction, and it seems to me that Karen Padir is going to be a good leader for the product.

A big improvement, for sure, and still there's more to improve …

This was an interesting week for sure. Of course, we all know it started with a bit of a shock news, but that's not nearly the most interesting bit about the conference. I'm posting a series of cleaned-up notes and opinions about what I saw there as I finish them. Will also try to link to further information where I've seen good notes. Please leave more links in the comments if you have any!

• My own presentation materials and the extended articles on data domains and log processing
• …