Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat writes:

I believe one of Red Hat’s most valuable contributions to the open source way is our profitability. We have clearly demonstrated that a company can be a good steward and catalyst in open source and be a profitable enterprise as well. I hope this serves as an example and inspiration to others to enter and participate in open source.

I use small apps to connect my blog, twitter and facebook accounts together. (...as described previously.) So when I post something on twitter, also my facebook status gets updated with the same message.

This week the Facebook app called "Twitter" did a small change: It would still post my tweets to my Facebook wall, but not set my Facebook status to the same message. I don't know why someone made this change, and if there are some users that will think of it as an improvement. At least for myself, I had started to use Twitter as the primary way to update both my Facebook and Twitter statuses conveniently at the same time.

I will not bother to comment on Monty's keynote (but I did post the text to it so you can make up your own mind) and this brings us then back to the Tuesday and Oracle's opening keynote featuring Edward Screven.

The Friday after the official MySQL conference was double booked. In parallel with the storage engine summit, Drizzle Developer Day 2010 was also happening. This event took the form of a hackathon, with free form discussions and hands on coding. I popped in, to experience the energy.

My conclusion both from Brian's keynote and the Developer Day is that:

For the Friday after the MySQL conference, Oracle had invited all storage engines to the traditional storage engine summit, but this was then canceled (or postponed) in the last minute. Since the engine vendors had already booked the day anyway, we agreed to sponsor the facility so the meeting could take place. In addition to those who had planned to be there, the meeting was also attended by Mikael Ronström, Jonas Oreland and Sanja Byelkin who had their flights cancelled. (Oracle was already represented by Konstantin Osipov.)

Also see https://askmonty.org/wiki/Storage_Engine_Summit_2010 for more complete notes of the summit.

We then finally came to the topic that comes naturally to anyone familiar with the MySQL architecture. Could Hadoop, or Hive, or whichever, be plugged into MySQL as a storage engine? And why would you want to do that? And can Timour's work to push down JOIN conditions be of any help? (The last question was interesting since Ted and his team were inherently against talking about JOINs at all :-)

We ended up concluding that 2 things could be interesting and considered "low hanging fruit":

SQL to PIG compiler.

(Btw, it is not immediately obvious if this task needs MySQL at all.)

(This is the first in a series of blogs written while I was trying to get home from Santa Clara. Posting them now as I'm back home and online.)

These MySQL conferences certainly get more interesting every year. Last year we got acquired and I went home thinking I need to start looking for a new job. This year Eyjafjallajõkull erupted and I had trouble getting home at all!

Pre-conference there was also the suspense to see whether the conference will take place at all, but O'Reilly and Colin pulled it together perfectly! It seems most if not all Europeans will eventually find their ways home, so all in all, all is well that ends well.

To recount everything we've learned, I will step backwards in time through the highlights as I saw them.

I just want to jot down a few comments here about an open-ed piece by Glyn Moody at the H-online: Why Making Money from Free Software Matters. It is a very good summary of the motivations I had in writing my book Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source and why I have since also strived to work towards making businesses benefit from Open Source models, and vice versa, making Open Source benefit from the businesses.

Says Glyn: