Friendly reminder that public nominations for MySQL Community Awards 2013 are open for another week. Please nominate persons, applications or companies/organizations that you think deserve it.

For inspiration, you may want to refresh your memory about winners from past years. They are all listed in the table below. Trivia: Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP and inventor of the SQL LIMIT clause is a winner of this award.

It is a new year and it's time again to start thinking of all the great people and companies that make the MySQL ecosystem so great. It is time to start thinking of this year's MySQL Community Awards.

Last year we had a record number of winners, eleven goblets were handed out! But behind the scenes things were even more exciting, there were several ties that forced the panel to do extra tie-breaking voting rounds. In one category we even had a 6-way tie! All of this just testifies to how much is happening in the MySQL world nowadays.

There are a few interesting learning resources recently created by activists in the MySQL community. I just wanted to link to them to spread the word. They are free and if you've been looking for a way to learn more about MySQL, you should have a look at these.

MySQL Marinate

This is something I haven't really seen done before (for MySQL): a virtual self study group. It is based on the idea of everyone reading the same book, and I assume Sheeri will then facilitate some commentary on what your read. Sheeri mentioned this in a blog post earlier, but yesterday I went to check the signup page and wow - there are already 117 (or 76, depending on whether you look to the left or to the right) students registered!

Percona Live UK took place this week. It was the second year in a row and once again a great conference. Thank you Percona for bringing the show to Europe, it means a lot for the European MySQL community - many people who don't visit the Santa Clara conference were present in London. It's kind of funny, I even meet more Finnish MySQL users in London than I do at home!

I gave 2 talks. Slides are now posted on Slideshare:

As a few LinkedIn friends already noticed, I have started working together with the Galera team at Codership. It is a part time "advisor" position and I still continue my full time work at Nokia, supporting various databases behind the new HERE.com portal.

We get a lot of requests for more blogs and better documentation to explain in-depth how Galera work. That's an area I will work on a lot. The first "deliverable" is out today: the first Galera white paper.

The Winter season for conferences is catching up speed.

DOAG

As I write this the DOAG conference in Germany is happening. It is one of the biggest (or the biggest?) Oracle user group conferences outside of USA. Many of my European friends in the MySQL space are talking there. As you know I have been a big fan of Galera Cluster for MySQL for over a year now, but I was perhaps a bit of an early adopter. Lo-and-behold, I was surprised to see the DOAG related press-release from SkySQL puts the creators of Galera first in their headline: Codership, SkySQL und weitere Top-Experten rund um das Thema ‘MySQL Datenbanken” in Nürnberg versammelt. Talk about crossing the chasm! Ralf Gebhardt, my other mentor from MySQL AB times, is speaking on MySQL HA solutions. Seppo, Erkan and Oli and people from Oracle are talking too.

Percona Live UK, Dec 2-3

It's the time of the year again: You have 2 more weeks to submit a great proposal to the biggest and baddest MySQL Conference: Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (Santa Clara). Like many things in the MySQL community, this conference has also gone through a transformation over the past 3 years. But last year the growing pains and uncertainty ended with Percona putting up a great show. Attendance was up again (over 1000) and there was a sense of energy and excitement for the future of MySQL. If you are like me and like to dwell in nostalgia (so that you can get into the right mood for submitting great proposals) my coverage of last year's conference is found here: part 1, part 2. (If you don't care about the nostalgia, remember that speakers get into the conference for free!)

Over the years many blog posts have been written about how to submit a great proposal for the MySQL Conference. By myself, Giuseppe, Baron, Shlomi, just to name a few.

Attached are the slides for my MySQL Connect talk Evaluating MySQL High-availability alternatives, which I will present today at 14:30 at the MySQL Connect conference.

A bit unusually I'm posting the material ahead of the talk. The point of the talk is about evaluating each alternative from your own perspective. With that in mind, if you're at the talk with your own laptop, feel free to browse the slides at your own pace from here.