I have to confess I'm kind of a wannabe hacker. I think of myself as a developer, yet in practice I always end up being a customer facing person like a Sales Engineer, a Trainer or basically anything where you do more talking than coding. But there is this tiny little Drupal module, footnotes, that I'm actually the proud maintainer of for several years now.

Having read a weeks worth of reactions to MySQL ending up at Oracle, I just want to say that by far the aptest1 commentary goes to Chris Powers from the Falcon team. A picture indeed says more than 1k words:

Now I know it is not the apocalypse and we probably won't be crucified either. But I do sympathise with the Falcon team, their reason of existence certainly is put more into question than us in general.

The prize to the most astonishing prediction goes to John Dvorak, writing in January 2008:

• 1is that a word?

As mentioned previously, Monty Widenius is starting his new company based on some interesting premises. With Zak Greant they have co-authored a pamflet where they outline a blueprint for Open Source companies. In many ways this could be considered the "Dogme 95" of Open Source businesses:-)

So we had a very nice dinner with Monty and the Finnish "MySQL Ab alumni". It was to my surprise augmented by Sergei Golubchick, whom I had never really met face to face and was delighted to be seated next to. Also a first for me was to meet Pekka Nousiainen, from the MySQL Cluster team. Which is funny because I kind of work together with him on IRC and email, but we had never met before "in real life" either.

Before the dinner I had asked in a rather cryptic message people to share some MySQL memories on a separate page on this site, followed up a couple days later by Kaj's less cryptic message. I printed whatever had arrived before I left for the restaurant and read a few snippets out loud. I should say that Monty liked it very much and thanked more than once for such a nice thought. He said that hearing some of the things you had written brought back many nice memories for him, and between all the Swedish drinking songs there was a sentimental moment right there. Personally I also liked the "international connection" of enabling Monty's friends to participate in this kind of virtual manner together with us Helsinki bound people that actually were there face-to-face so to speak. After all, MySQL always was an international project.

if( $name == "Monty Widenius" ) {
  STOP reading;
}
else {
  Contribute a personal MySQL memory here
  then spread-the-word!
}

So now that we have said goodbye to the old crew, I thought it might be appropriate to make some forward looking statements, as publicly traded companies say...

Kaj's talk at FOSDEM seems to be a good summary of the situation: We'll probably become a bit more integrated into Sun, there'll probably be less Swedish drinking songs1 , and other than that we don't know yet.

One observation one could make is that instead of Scandinavian drinking songs, there might be some Turkish or Persian influnce taking over. In honour of that, today's post is a favorite internet viral video from these regions:

• 1Mårten finished his last all hands staff meeting (call) as they apparently have started once upon a time, singing Helan går. (I hope I don't get into trouble now, contents of the staff meetings are of course company confidential...)

I try to limit the amount of hair-cut blog posts, but since The Data Charmer is writing travel blogs too... Here are some observations from Moscow:

It seems January and February were just completely taken up by customer engagements. I don't know if it is due to the recession or what, but we who are selling MySQL are just very busy right now. Towards the end of February I finally got on top of my life again, and on the bright side, I took almost a full week off from work, just to get even with all the overtime I accumulated.

This is old news now, but I still want to make a note of these historical events for my own blog too. If you're like yawn... then don't read it. OTOH, seems like I'm in good company commenting on this this week :-)

So some weeks ago we were hit by the surprising news that Mårten will leave Sun, just a few days after Monty had decided to do so too.

Let's make some comments in ORDER BY DESC chronological order.

(This is a purely technical or at least semi-technical post about a database and Web20 architecural issue.)

I just noticed about 5-10 status updates from my friends on Facebook are duplicated. Reading from the top I get to "17 hours ago" and then it restarts with duplicate status update messages from "5 hours ago".

Last Friday I got to enjoy the benefit of being a MySQL'r and located in Finland: We were invited to Monty, Anna and Maria for a MySQL Christmas party. Now that we are part of Sun, the company of course organises its own official Christmas party (who organises parties on a Thursday???) like all companies do, but a special MySQL party was still a very good idea, thanks Monty for inviting us. I especially enjoyed meeting some of the MySQL'rs who had recently either left Sun or happened to be on maternity leave.