Some time ago Stephen O'Grady and Brian Aker had an interesting Blogo-dialogue about what they call the "Cambrian Explosion" of open source development. The Cambrian Explosion means that we increasingly see forks of projects being developed in different directions, where traditionally we are used to open source development happening in relatively hierarchical and easy to follow upstream and downstream relationships. This is exactly what happens in the MySQL community currently, where in total there is more progress than ever before, but that progress is divided among several competing forks, none of which is strictly in an upstream-downstream hierarchy with …

You can now find MariaDB 5.2 in your ports tree in FreeBSD. Check out ports/databases/mariadb. Its currently at MariaDB 5.2.4 and the package maintainer will continue updating it as new releases are made. Naturally the documentation in the Knowledgebase has been updated to reflect this.

It was ready for a while already, but now it's part of the official FOSDEM schedule as well: I am very pleased to announce the presentations and speakers of the MySQL & Friends Developer Room, which will take place this coming Saturday (5th of February) in Brussels, Belgium.

This year, our DevRoom will be located in room H.2213 (in the H Building), which has a capacity of up to 100 people and will be available to us from 13:00-19:00 o'clock. We have 12 sessions lined up, each will last 25 minutes (incl. Q&A). Without further ado, here's our schedule:

Kris Buytaert organized a MySQL Meetup at FOSDEM last year, and because of the success we’ll be doing it again this year, in the same restaurant: Sogno d’Italia.

Everybody is invited to come to the dinner. Just register on http://mysqlandfriendsfosdem2011.eventbrite.com/ so we have an idea how many reservations we should make. The maximum capacity is about 40 people.

We’ll plan to meet at 19:00 on Saturday, under the big tree in front of the AW building. Then we’ll walk to the restaurant, which is about 5 minutes walking distance.

The Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) has formed the MySQL Council, with the purpose of addressing the interests and needs of MySQL users.

The current Council members are:

• Sarah Novotny, Blue Gecko, Council Chair
• Sheeri Cabral, PalominoDB
• Bradley Kuszmaul, Tokutek
• Giuseppe Maxia, Continuent
• Rob Wultsch, GoDaddy.com
• Matt Yonkovit, Percona

The IOUG is a well established and respected institution, with more than 20,000 database professionals registered as its members. In the long history of Oracle, the IOUG has always played a role in the aftermath of many acquisitions, extending a friendly hand to the newcomers in the family. I have spent much time with IOUG people, and I was impressed by their enthusiasm and …

I am pleased to announce that the Oracle ACE program has two new MySQL inductees. These people actively contribute to the MySQL community via a varied means in an unbiased and non commercial way.

Giuseppe Maxia (aka DataCharmer) is no stranger to the MySQL community having filled a position with MySQL Inc/Sun Microsystems/Oracle Corporation in the Community team for many years. Giuseppe was an active member in the community before this position, and continues to provide great input with tools such as the MySQL sandbox and many project and code snippets on the MySQL Forge as well as many writings for the Developer zone.

…

Just a quick reminder: the Oracle user groups of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Russia are organizing a joint conference, the Harmony. It will take place on May 19th-20th in Helsinki, Finland. I've met the organizers at the IOUC summit that took place at the Oracle HQ this week and they would love to have some more MySQL content. So if you have an idea for a talk about a MySQL-related topic, please submit it! The call for papers closes on February, 1st!

My calendar is filling up with speaking engagements about MySQL at various events quickly. Here is a list of events for the coming months where I'll be present:

• On Wednesday, January 26th, I will be speaking about MySQL High Availability Solutions at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup. I feel honored for having been invited to speak there and I'm quite excited that venue is fully booked! I look forward to meeting so many MySQL users in one place.
• On Saturday, February 5th, I'll be attending and speaking at the MySQL & Friends Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. I helped organizing the DevRoom and preparing the schedule for this event. We …

After last week’s post about bloggin trends, this week I will go through the most active bloggers over the years as well as particularly for 2010.

What is the range of time analysed here?

mysql >  select min(date_time), max(date_time) from blogs;
+---------------------+---------------------+
| min(date_time)      | max(date_time)      |
+---------------------+---------------------+
| 2004-03-04 19:47:00 | 2011-01-07 13:22:00 |
+---------------------+---------------------+
1 row in set (0.04 sec)

How many blog posts in the above period (almost 7years)?

mysql >  select count(*) from blogs;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|    21698 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

How many authors have contributed to planetmysql?

mysql >  select count(distinct(author)) from blogs; …