So, first two days of mysqlconf’07 are finished now. What can I say is that without any doubts: It worth it! If you’re working on some high traffic projects, some high-loaded database driven systems, etc, you definitely should attend such conferences - you’d never be able to get such big amounts of information from the best people in the industry as you can get here.

I’ve been attending mostly practical MySQL scale-out sessions and BOFs and I’ve got really controversial impressions. No - everybody was great, controversial thing is my own level - I never before was so sure that I know nothing at all! I see people here for which most of new things for me (especially in MySQL scaling) are pretty obvious and it is hard to keep myself from some kind of self-beating because I don’t know these things.

Interesting thing happened today - I clearly realized why YouTube guys got their billion and we or someone else didn’t - IMHO - …

My slides from the tutorial are posted on the Develooper talks page. I'll add a link to Jays slides when he posts them.

In my second day at the MySQL Conference and Expo 2007, I attended keynotes, several sessions, and three BoF (Birds of a Feather) sessions. This article is about these sessions. Again, I'll focus on the Big Ideas and let you read other people's blog posts for the small details.

At the end of today’s Clash of the DB Egos keynote, I had the pleasure of delivering the following speech:

Monty: When I was a child, my father used to work for the same company as Mike Smith [1] works for now. He told me about the concept of an IBM Fellow, which is considered to be the highest honour a technologist at IBM can achieve. Some of them are Nobel Prize winners, you get the picture. Today, MySQL has decided to honour you, for your work so far, and for the work we hope you will put in for the benefit of MySQL and its Community for many years to come. Thank you for creating MySQL, and for making meaning (like Guy Kawasaki spoke about yesterday [2]). You, Monty, have made all of this possible: the storage engines, the ecosystem, the conference. You’ve inspired and …

By Tim O'Reilly

Here are a few tidbits I've overheard while walking the halls at the MySQL User Conference today:

• "I was really impressed by Marten Mickos' keynote. I guess in Europe they hire CEOs who really know their stuff." (Ouch!)
• "I'm sitting here at lunch with a guy from Mexico who uses MySQL to manage an auto manufacturing business. And those guys across the table are from istockphoto.com in Canada. And they're both talking to an engineer from Sweden about MySQL performance optimization. It doesn't get much better than this."
• "This is my favorite conference. There's so much good material, and it's all so practical."
• "Someone's turned S3 into a storage engine for MySQL. How cool is …

Years ago, I remember pontificating that open source would never touch the application market. Narrowly viewing open source through the prism of the day, I said things like this (to John Koenig at IT Managers Journal):

To date, enterprise-focused open source has been best in those areas of the software stack that have a broad (approaching universal) user population. Things like operating systems and browsers. When you have a population with the aptitude and interest in improving something (like the Linux kernel), there's simply no better way to develop it -- let users develop to what they want.

Open source works less well in applications that have a smaller niche of users. It's not that open source development communities can't do applications because we find FireFox, OpenOffice, and others, or that they can't do vertical market applications, because we …

?What ever advice you got, keep it to yourself, your not the target market.”

Red Hat & One Laptop Per Child UI Designer to bunch of suits - MySQL Conference 2007

CollabNet acquires SourceForge Enterprise Edition from VA Software. Red Hat acquires MetaMatrix for JBoss offering. MontaVista acquires MontaVista Ltd and Liberte. (and more)

Note: Due to a cross-country conference trip and limited Internet access, there was no 451 CAOS Links on Monday 04/23/07.

CollabNet and VA Software Sign Asset Purchase Agreement for Acquisition of SourceForge Enterprise Edition Business by CollabNet, CollabNet (Press Release)

Red Hat Defines Next Significant Open Source Migration Opportunity, Red Hat (Press Release)

MontaVista Acquires Two Companies to Increase Professional Services Capacity and to Broaden European Market Coverage, MontaVista …

I spoke to Matt and Barry today, and it was great to see them at the DotOrg Pavilion at the MySQL Expo, since the last time we caught up was at WordCamp 2006. Since WordCamp, Wordpress.com is now spanning something like 900,000+ registered users! That number used to be over 300,000+, just a few months ago, so it looks like they’re really popular.

While Barry entertained a visitor, Matt and I got to talking about growing companies. He’s really happy with the size of Automattic, and is going to try for as long as possible to keep the company size, under fifty. He’s also found it interesting that some people are running WordPress 1.2 (ick! security holes galore), and while I worried that the database itself might not be migrate-able, he mentions that going …

Today’s keynote, by MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, was titled The Participatory & Disruptive Spirit of the Dolphin. Here are some random notes I took.

Tired                Wired

Packaged Apps        On-Demand

Closed Source        Open Source (jboss, php, mysql, apache, linux)

Complex Hardware     Commodity Hardware

Most innovative companies, are clearly wired, and are enjoying the technology market shifts. Small players can now swim around the big players.

“Open Source disrupts inefficient models and produces new wealth.”

Star Wreck - Finnish dry humor, production by amateurs, and exteremely popular. Catch it on YouTube?

“We hope you’ll travel to MECA” - MySQL Enterprise Connection Alliance. Probably not the most sensible comment, but it does humor in it ;-)

Serve the underserved - offer flying to those that would otherwise …