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

Several people nominated Jeremy and indeed he has a long history with MySQL, pretty much back to the first release.

For example, people mentioned Jeremy's insights shared on his blog, on issues such as Linux NUMA memory management. His recent work on innodb_ruby has been widely appreciated both for it's educational value and perhaps even some potential usefullness.

Most of us will have used the SHOW PROFILE(S) commands created by Jeremy - and for a long time this was the only community contribution that actually made it into MySQL Server!

His consulting company Proven Scaling used to mirror the MySQL Enterprise binaries that were GPL but not otherwise publicly available. This grew into a historical archive of (almost) all MySQL binaries ever released. Related to his issues with the MySQL Enterprise process, and poor handling of community contributions, Proven Scaling was actually the first company to create a community fork of MySQL known as Dorsal Source.

You might also remember in 2008 Jeremy took a public stand against MySQL's plans to offer new backup functionality only as closed source. This resulted in public outcry on Slashdot and elsewhere, and Sun eventually commanded MySQL executives to give up on those plans.

So any way we look at it, over the years he has really contributed a lot and always had the interests of the MySQL Community close to his heart.

Shane Bester

The MySQL bugs database and quality in general has been a topic of conversation of the past years. A few people in our community dedicate their lives to hunting down and often also fixing bugs, and might even have a blog discussing bugs and quality in MySQL. Shane is one of them - in fact he is the leading reporter of MySQL bugs!

Ronald Bradford

Ronald is a well known blogger, speaker and author in the MySQL community. In the past year alone he has published 3 books in the Effective MySQL series. He also spends several weeks a year on the road talking about MySQL on the Oracle tech tours and other events.

This is the second time Ronald wins this award, having won also in 2009.

MySQL Community Awards: Application of the Year 2013

PhpMyAdmin (received by lead developer Marc Delisle)

Users nominated PhpMyAdmin saying: It gives me an easy, free way to manage my Wordpress databases, the developers are constantly vigilent, keeping us provided with security updates and other improvements. My ISP provides it to all customers as part of cPanel. It's famous, ubiquitous and well documented. ...it's a GREAT tool, *because* it lets people with limited experience do what they need to do.

MySQL Sandbox (received by developer Giuseppe Maxia)

MySQL Sandbox is a flexible tool that helps to install, test, and dispose of MySQL versions quickly and painlessly. It has been available since 2005, and it is kept up-to-date with support for MariaDB, Percona Server, and MySQL 5.6.

Since 2010 we have been deciding these awards by a small group of what I'd like to call leaders in our community. They are qualified to select these winners, because they themselves have previously won this award too. Since this is an annual tradition, the process is very much about just doing the same thing as we did last year. But I've always made a point of reminding the panel that they themselves are the authority that can decide to award anyone or anything they want, and they are not subjet to or bound by anything, not even tradition itself.

This year the panel decided to pick up on this encouragement, and created a whole new award category, that has never been handed out before. One of the unique strengths of MySQL's architecture is the storage engine architecture, which has enabled an ecosystem of innovation not seen in any other database product or community.

It is therefore very fitting that the panel has decided to introduce a new special award, that's never been done before: Storage Engine of the Year 2013.

MySQL Community Awards: Storage Engine of the Year 2013

NDB - the storage engine that is MySQL NDB Cluster (received by Tomas Ulin, long time Director of NDB team)

It's a truly impressive feat of engineering. Mikael Ronström and NDB has been a forerunner in MySQL performance, clustering, sharding and de-facto it even implemented the idea of NoSQL or AlsoSQL years before NoSQL became mainstream use.

MySQL Community Awards: Corporate Contributor of the Year 2013

Facebook

For its continuous support of the MySQL environment, with funding, hiring, publishing, and promoting MySQL products, companies, and individuals.

Facebook has previously also won the MySQL Application of the Year award, but has since grown from being an end user to one of the most significant contributors in our community!

Continuent

By providing technologies that intertwine MySQL with other opensource technologies, they are applying pressure for openness and relevance. Robert Hodges is one of the peacemakers in our community.

Tokutek

They've been an active sponsor and presenter at conferences and user groups, and participate in the IOUG MySQL council too. They have contributed some patches to MySQL/MariaDB and several open source benchmark tools. And of course they create an innovative MySQL storage engine, which earlier this week was released as open source under the GPLv2 license. Thank you Tokutek!