5 years of MySQL

People often write a blog post when they reach some nice anniversary since they joined MySQL community. Well, for those old enough it usually means when they joined MySQL AB as employee. For me this was January 2008. Because I didn't remember the month correctly, I haven't blogged anything then, but decided to save it for a better opportunity - now.

TL;DR Starting this week I will be working for 10gen, selling MongoDB to the Nordics. This blog post is really long - even then it doesn't contain the most interesting stories, I'm not sure if they can ever be published. Sorry for the length, but remember you don't need to read all at once. This is my last MySQL post so save some of it for cold winter days!

2008 - Sun acquisition

One of the greatest things with working in the MySQL community has been to meet so many people and travel in different countries and cultures. In my last blog post I mentioned how I learned that in Southern Europe it is considered offensive to go too early to meet your customer. As the customer is expecting you to come later than agreed (everyone always does), if you show up too early you are taking away time that he was expecting to still use to prepare for the meeting.

Below are the slides from my last talk at this Percona Live Worldwide MySQL Conference. The idea for this talk was proposed by my co-presenter Massimo Brignoli and goes back to a debate on this topic that went through the MySQL blogosphere during last Autumn - which in itself was sparked by an outstanding retrospective published about a MySQL failure at Github.

Slides from my Percona Live talk evaluating the new spatial features in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 are now online. This is new material I have never presented before. It is based on work I have done in my job at Nokia HERE.com location services. So even if at this conference it draws less attention than my HA talks, it is actually what I'm most proud of to present.

TL;DR summary is that PostgreSQL has lots of features but MySQL has much better ease of use and performance. (I copy paste this standard sentence into any PostgreSQL vs MySQL evaluation I do :-) The MongoDB info is basically outdated, as the new 2.4 release introduces completely new implementation based on GeoJSON, new indexing, neither of which I tested.

MySQL Community Awards 2013 were announced earlier today at the MySQL Conference & Expo...

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It's time again to award persons, applications and companies in the MySQL Community. This is an annual tradition to highlight and give appreciation to some of the things that make MySQL so great.

The first awards were given out in 2005, and since 2010 the winners have been chosen by a community panel of which myself and Shlomi Noach are the co-secretaries. There has been a public nomination period in January and the final voting is done by a panel who are themselves former winners of the award.

The first category is

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the Year 2013

The first winner is...

Jeremy Cole

Good morning Percona Live visitors! Attached to this post you can find a spreadsheet (both LibreOffice or Excel, as you prefer) that you can use towards the end of my tutorial. I've also attached the slides so you can download a copy of them.

For reasons that I will blog about in a couple of weeks, several people last week asked me what I think about open core. My answer was that nowadays I don't care much about the topic. Long time readers of this blog might be surprised at such an answer, so I thought this was a good time to reflect on why I don't think it is very important anymore, and more importantly to document the empirical evindence that we now have about open core as a business strategy.

The next Helsinki MySQL User Group is set for Tuesday, February 19. Lari Pulkkinen from Arbitron Mobile will talk about their project adopting SSD disks for better MySQL performance. Yes, there are benchmarks included.

Note the changed location: Oracle office in Gräsantörmä 2, Espoo. We are glad to have Oracle Finland sponsoring the user group by taking turns as meetup host. Food and sauna will be available after the talk as is customary.

More details and signup at Meetup.com.