The latest from the MySQL community

There is a new release of MySQL Community Server available (MySQL Server 5.1.28-rc).  The full list of changes can be found here.  Download the release now.

 To see what is coming in the next release, 5.1.29, which is not yet released, go here.

There are still a few impediments, but the database group …

The MySQL Community Team is about to lose a valuable member. In a few weeks, Jay Pipes, Community Relations Manager for North America, is joining the Drizzle project, under a different organization within Sun, and he won't be much available for MySQL community matters anymore.

On one hand, I am glad for Jay. He has been craving for more technical work, and he happily jumped at the offer from the Drizzle team. On the other hand, I have now the hard task of finding a worthy replacement. It won't be easy. For several years we have taken Jay's presence for granted, and he has done incredibly remarkable things, like creating MySQL Forge (v1 and v2) and organizing two MySQL Users Conferences and two MySQL Camps.

So, here I am, shouting to the world my need for a new manager. What am I looking for? What makes a good Community Relations Manager? …

This year's Systems trade fair will take place from October 21st-24th in Munich, Germany. Sun will be present there with a stand in the exhibition area (Hall B2, Stand 329) and we also sponsor a conference themed "Perspective Open Source" that will provide half-day sessions (in German) about opensource-related topics throughout the week.

Some highlights of what we'll present on our stand:

• MySQL
• Sun Fire Servers (with Intel Xeon Processors)
• Open Storage …

This year's Systems trade fair will take place from October 21st-24th in Munich, Germany. Sun will be present there with a stand in the exhibition area (Hall B2, Stand 329) and we also sponsor a conference themed "Perspective Open Source" that will provide half-day sessions (in German) about opensource-related topics throughout the week.

Some highlights of what we'll present on our stand:

• MySQL
• Sun Fire Servers (with Intel Xeon Processors)
• Open Storage …

After having worked for two years and one quarter of a year with MySQL AB (now Sun), I have decided to resign and pursue another career.

Before I joined MySQL AB I was working as a database consultant and application developer. I knew that joining MySQL would mean giving that up, but I was happy to do so because I really liked the MySQL product. I was also attracted by the company itself, the flexible working hours, working from home, travelling abroad, and, very important, being one of the few companies that is capable creating FOSS software on a commercial basis.

I have had a splendid time at MySQL AB, and later Sun. I met lots of smart people and travelled to a bunch of places I would probably not've had the chance to visit otherwise. I learned a lot about the …

Yesterday, I completed a most significant emotional step in the integration of MySQL into Sun. As about 75 % of MySQLers had already done prior to myself, I migrated my main mail account from MySQL’s mail server to Sun’s.

Yes, I am still reachable @mysql.com. And I was already earlier reachable on @Sun.COM, in addition to my private @arno.fi. But now Sun’s email server is the one I use for both sending and receiving email. So this minor administrative step raises questions for me whether my signature should primarily feature my @Sun.COM email address, or whether I should remain @mysql.com. Luckily (strangely? sadly?) Sun allows me to follow my own judgement on this one.

A reason for happiness is that I am reachable as “kaj” on both …

It was announced last week that Sun is investing in Infobright to fuel the growth of the new www.infobright.org open source community and the Infobright Community Edition (ICE) open source data warehouse.  The announcement from Infobright can be found here.  The open source data warehouse from Infobright is based on MySQL.  See more press here.

To learn more about data warehousing with Infobright and MySQL, look at this article done by MySQL Product Management.

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as celia wrote earlier, we are in riga, latvia for a meeting of the mysql developers. she is holed up in the hotel room working on a screenplay (or maybe in the atrium where the wifi is better), and i am in a presentation about blogging.

celia already posted pictures from our excursion day on sunday (the day we didn’t sit around in the meeting rooms at the hotel). i took some video which i will figure out how to deal with once we are back home.

MySQL Lists are available via NNTP, so you can use your newsreader! If only all lists were like this.

Now for the real motivations…

After all acquisitions, things tend to change. We’ve been mostly nudged to migrate to using Sun’s email systems, and you can imagine its fun moving about three years worth of mail from one server to another. Especially, while you’re at the developer’s meeting, with lots of people sucking bandwidth.

The recommended method is to Ctrl+drag (OK, Command+Drag for me on the Mac) folders. This is called pain. My Sieve filters are also not importing without pain.

As a consequence, I’ve unsubscribed from all MySQL Lists. But that’s the point of this post - you can read all MySQL Lists using NNTP (with a newsreader of course - Thunderbird is …