This year was the first year the public could nominate candidates for these awards. We got in many nominations and this really helped the panel to get an overview of everything that is noteworthy in the MySQL ecosystem right now. Thank you to everyone who participated by sending in nominations.

In the first category the panel received and debated over a dozen suggestions. There are so many great people in this community, it is easy to think of people who truly deserve to be awarded. There were however two persons who clearly stood out with a track record of years and years of broad and really key contributions to the MySQL community. These two persons also clearly stood out both in number of nominations and number of votes. Therefore, the...

O'Reilly MySQL Community Contributor of the Year 2011

...award, goes to

Yasufumi Kinoshita

For many years of work improving InnoDB performance. Yasufumi was the first one outside of MySQL AB or Innobase Oy to look at InnoDB code and start publishing performance improvements. His early work was an indication of what was possible to achieve and inspired others, such as the acclaimed Google team to invest in more similar improvements. Some of Yasufumi's work is today included in the InnoDB Plugin and MySQL 5.5, and newer work in Percona Server with XtraDB. Finally, he is the creator of Xtrabackup, the only open source backup tool for online MySQL backups.

Yasufumi was unfortunately not able to receive his award in person, as his house was impacted by the earthquake in Japan, he could not travel to the conference this year. Update: Baron Schwartz has published a correction saying that Yasufumi's house is fine. I'm the one who misunderstood his situation and unfortunately spread that information, so I offer my apologies, but at the same time I'm glad to hear everything is fine with Yasufumi's home.

...and...

Giuseppe Maxia

For years Giuseppe has been one of the most appreciated bloggers when it comes to educating us on how new MySQL features work, and how to get more out of the old features. But the breadth of his activities go far beyond blogging about MySQL. An example of working broadly across the community is his testing and providing feedback on Drizzle, and working as tech reviewer for MySQL books. He is an active participant, speaker, and even organizer of MySQL related conferences and meetings. And he even maintains a few projects of his own: the MySQL Sandbox project has proven a vital tool to anyone who needs to test many different MySQL versions on their PC side by side and is also the maintainer of the "test-db" sample database.

This is the second time Giuseppe wins this award, he was awarded already in 2006, the first year this award was given out.

In the following category we have often seen cool MySQL based applications that are globally known household names and often service millions of people daily. The panel this year chose to recognize two applications that are important in another way: they enhance MySQL itself.

O'Reilly MySQL Application of the Year 2011

...goes to:

Tungsten Replicator

As high availability has become more important, and we even have to deal with data replicated across many continents, replication has become a hotly discussed topic. Tungsten was already known for making complex, and even heterogeneous replication setups easy to manage, but the panel especially appreciated a feature in Tungsten's newest version: parallel replication, which improves replication throughput performance makes Tungsten the solution that addresses both high availability and performance.

Xtrabackup

Taking a consistent backup of a large database, while the database is operating all the time is called online backup. With today's online world, this has become the norm and taking a service offline for backup purposes is not really an option. Until now there has not been an open source tool for doing online backups in MySQL, and various workarounds like filesystem snapshots had been employed instead. Xtrabackup from Percona was first released less than a year ago, but has quickly gained a lot of attention since it solves this very problem.

With the Corporate Contributor of the Year award we wish to give recognition to companies who in one way or another have sponsored and made MySQL better.

O'Reilly MySQL Corporate Contributor of the Year 2011

...goes to...

DeNA

DeNA is Japan's biggest social game provider and run hundreds of MySQL servers to provide their services. So it is not surprising they also employ some of Japan's best and world famous MySQL experts to work on their LAMP stack. This team produced one of the most interesting innovations MySQL has seen for a while: HandlerSocket is MySQL's answer to the NoSQL trend, and with a vengeance. With read-transactions now running over 700% faster, it makes MySQL the fastest NoSQL key-value solution out there. And you get best of both worlds: MySQL and NoSQL in the same package.

The panel of 2011 consisted of the 2 conference co-chairs: Colin Charles and Brian Aker, and 2 previous years winners of the Community Contributor award: Mark Callaghan, Kai Seidler, Daniel Nichter, Ronald Bradford, Shlomi Noach and Marc Delisle. Henrik Ingo acted as non-voting secretary.