The Winter season for conferences is catching up speed.

DOAG

As I write this the DOAG conference in Germany is happening. It is one of the biggest (or the biggest?) Oracle user group conferences outside of USA. Many of my European friends in the MySQL space are talking there. As you know I have been a big fan of Galera Cluster for MySQL for over a year now, but I was perhaps a bit of an early adopter. Lo-and-behold, I was surprised to see the DOAG related press-release from SkySQL puts the creators of Galera first in their headline: Codership, SkySQL und weitere Top-Experten rund um das Thema ‘MySQL Datenbanken” in Nürnberg versammelt. Talk about crossing the chasm! Ralf Gebhardt, my other mentor from MySQL AB times, is speaking on MySQL HA solutions. Seppo, Erkan and Oli and people from Oracle are talking too.

Percona Live UK, Dec 2-3

It's the time of the year again: You have 2 more weeks to submit a great proposal to the biggest and baddest MySQL Conference: Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (Santa Clara). Like many things in the MySQL community, this conference has also gone through a transformation over the past 3 years. But last year the growing pains and uncertainty ended with Percona putting up a great show. Attendance was up again (over 1000) and there was a sense of energy and excitement for the future of MySQL. If you are like me and like to dwell in nostalgia (so that you can get into the right mood for submitting great proposals) my coverage of last year's conference is found here: part 1, part 2. (If you don't care about the nostalgia, remember that speakers get into the conference for free!)

Over the years many blog posts have been written about how to submit a great proposal for the MySQL Conference. By myself, Giuseppe, Baron, Shlomi, just to name a few.

Simon Phipps, who's Computer World UK blog isn't aggregated on Planet MySQL, has a blog post which reveals the truth behind the missing MySQL test cases that many of us commented on some time ago (including myself). You can read Simon's blog post here.

As you remember, there were various things that happened (or rather ceased to happen) during the Summer which led to people complaining that Oracle's MySQL is closing down. As a result of the uproar, source code trees at Launchpad were immediately refreshed. Otoh, there was never any public explanation why test cases for new bug fixes are withheld.

Here are the slides of the talk I just gave at Froscon. (Video should be available soon.)

I promised to still post some general comments about the MySQL ecosystem, to conclude my outlook of State of the MySQL forks and Drizzle. I will do this now in the form of answering questions I got in the comments, twitter and some that I make up just myself.

Oracle has not stopped updating bzr trees

I got several comments and questions on my previous blog "The State of the MySQL forks". One question was "Why didn't you mention Drizzle?" So I will say something about Drizzle here before concluding with other remarks.

So why didn't you mention Drizzle?

Mainly because the post was already long and also I had to wrap up and call into a meeting.

It's been some time since I last wrote an overview of the state of the MySQL forks, but the last few weeks have been eventful enough that it is a good time to again see how the competing variants are positioned against each other.

I have written on this topic 1-2 times a year. Here are links to the previous overviews:

Map of MySQL forks and branches (2010)
The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating (2010)
Observations on Drizzle and PostgreSQL
Percona.tv: State of the MySQL ecosystem (2011)
State of the MySQL forks: via a particular example of authentication plugins

As is the case with this post, many of those previous ones coincide with some events or discussion at the time they were written, and the posts contain links to other bloggers commenting on whatever was current then.

I found a very interesting blog post today: Open Source IaaS Community Analysis. It is a statistical analysis into forum/mailing-list traffic of the 4 major private cloud open source projects: OpenStack, OpenNebula, Eucalyptus and Cloudstack. While I have never met or read anything from the author, qyjohn, it seems we actually worked at Sun at the same time :-)

For a casual follower - like me - of these four cloud projects, the post is interesting in many ways. But for anyone interested in open source business models it is very interesting indeed. Readers of this blog will remember my research from 2010: How to grow your open source project 10x and revenues 5x. The research showed that 9 out of 9 Xtra Large projects are all governed through foundations, whereas the best performing open source codebases owned by a single vendor have developer communities that are roughly 10x smaller. Based on this observation I made this recommendation:

The Helsinki MySQL User Group will meet at the usual place on May 29th. Click here for details and to RSVP. Linas Varbalas will talk about Tungsten and maybe dare a live demo!

Linas is in town for the OUGF Harmony conference 2012. The conference might of course be of some interest to user group members too. Due to the conference we also have other famous MySQLrs in town, Sheeri Kabral of OurSQLcast fame has also confirmed she will attend the user group (and maybe have OurSQLcast CD's with her?)

I have finally recovered from my trip to Santa Clara enough that I can scribble down some notes from this year's MySQL Conference. Writing a travel report is part of the deal where my employer covers the travel expense, so even if many people have written about the conference, I need to do it too. And judging from the many posts for instance from Pythian's direction, Nokia is perhaps not the only company with such a policy?

Baron's keynote

There has usually always been something that can be called a "soft keynote". Pirate Party founder Rick Falckvinge speaking at a database conference is a memorable example (I still keep in touch with him, having met him at the Hyatt Santa Clara). This year there was one less day, and therefore less keynotes. The soft keynote was therefore taken care of by Baron using some time out of Peter's opening keynote. Baron's talk was an ode to the conference itself, underscoring the meaning of the conference beyond just learning about technology. Sharing his own journey from a numb ASP.NET coder ("a good day at the office was when I changed a table based layout to pure CSS ...but nobody else seemed to care.") to his role today, he challenged people to network, make new friends and new revolutionary ideas. To me, it was a great opening keynote (and quite obviously would have made less sense on the last day of the conference). The talk, including Peter's part, is available on Percona.TV.