Winners of the 2012 MySQL Community Awards were announced at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo just a few hours ago:

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In terms of continuing with MySQL traditions, it has been my privilege the past years to be the secretary of the MySQL Community Awards panel. We have so many amazing persons, products and companies in this community. One of the nicest thing we can do to each other, and what really builds and fuels a community, is to show appreciation and say thanks to people that really deserve it.

Today I'm coming out of the closet. Since I'm a professional database expert I try to be like the mainstream and use the commercial MySQL forks (including MySQL itself). But I think those close to me have already known for some time that I like community based open source projects. I cannot deny it any longer, so let me just say it: I'm a Drizzle contributor and I'm very much engaged!

I've been eyeing the Drizzle project since it started in 2008. Already then there were dozens of MySQL hackers for which this project was a refuge they instantly flocked to. Finally a real open source project based on MySQL code that they could contribute to, and they did. It was like a breath of fresh air in a culture that previously had only accepted one kind of relationships: that between an employer and an employee. Drizzle was more liberal. It accepted also forms of engagement already common in most other open source projects that are based on relationships between 2 or more consenting contributors.

But in 2008 I wasn't yet ready to engage with Drizzle. Like I said, I worked in a role where I would go to database users and help them use MySQL in demanding production settings. So as much as I admired Drizzle already back then, I needed something that could give me good releases, and support me when needed.

I've never been to Burning Man myself, but I'm aware of the event due to Drizzle development stalling to a halt during that festival. In other words, I have many friends that go there.

It was interesting to read a statement from the organizers of Burning Man about the fact that this year there is way more demand for Burning Man tickets than they can sell. Apparently even the desert has its limits (and more so the road leading to it).

Organically growing volunteer projects are exciting because they just grow and grow and there seems to be nothing there to stop them. But once in a while they hit bottlenecks that need to be solved.

An annual tradition of the upcoming MySQL user conference is the awards ceremony. Last year we introduced the opportunity for everyone in the community to nominate candidates and this was a big success. Now is the time to start nominating deserving winners for the awards for 2012, in the 3 categories named below.

The winners will be selected by a community panel (see below) and winners will be announced on Wednesday, April 11th at the Santa Clara Convention Center, as part of the evening Community Reception.

How:

Please send in your suggestions for deserving winners
to: mysql.awards [at] gmail.com
no later than: 23:59 Sunday February 29th (Pacific time)

Hi again

It's time to announce the next Helsinki MySQL User Group which is on February 8 at 18:00. Venue is Solinor's meeting and sauna facilities in North Haaga: https://www.meetup.com/The-Helsinki-MySQL-User-Group/events/42163422/

By popular request, Monty will be sharing news about MariaDB, after which there is the usual food, beverages, sauna and socializing.

The organizers would really appreciate it if you could RSVP at the meetup request above. Last time the place was already packed and now with this kind of superstar speaker the hosts want to make sure they book an appropriate room and enough food. (Seems there's already 20+ going!)

See you there!

A year ago I posted a blog on The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating. (Also Giuseppe wrote about the topic at that time, and Peter Zaitsev covers it in his conference keynotes.) So I've been wondering if it would be good to write an update on the topic now, and in that case what to write.

There's now 2 weeks left of the Call for Papers for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (Santa Clara, CA). This weekend I've been finalizing my abstracts for submission and I trust many of you are doing the same. (If nothing else, do it for the free entrance! Or because you're passionate about MySQL, yeah, that's what I meant...)

This is the main annual MySQL event, so I thought it is worth the bandwidth to use these two weeks for some discussion and brainstorming. We are the MySQL community, it's up to us to make this a great conference now! This year I'm on the program committee, so I'm looking forward to reviewing many, many great proposals. At the same time, I'm interested to hear what you, dear readers - and hopefully future conference visitors - are interested in seeing at the conference? I'll share my ideas here and you can share yours in the comments or if you prefer you can email me at henrik.ingo [at] avoinelama.fi.

In July I attended the Community Leadership Summit in Portland. This was the 3rd CLS overall and my second. The first one was organized in San Jose 2 years ago. I noticed there has been a small evolution between those two years (which might partly be due to geography too). The first one in San Jose I think was very successful and drew many de-facto leaders in the open source community, including Bruce Perens himself (author of the Open Source Definition). In Portland there was perhaps less of those, but instead you could see how the audience increasingly consisted of people who actually work as full time Community Managers for various businesses, or in some cases for a non-profit organization.

Update: I won't be in Moscow after all. I was denied visa on grounds that my passport is beginning to fall apart and there wasn't time to get new passport, invitation and visa. Maybe next year - I was excited to go.

October brings 2 very interesting conferences. I will be speaking first on Oct 3rd at HighLoad++ in Moscow and a few weeks later on Oct Oct 25 at Percona Live in London. I will give a talk called Choosing a MySQL Replication / High Availability Solution which is based on my thinking developed in my recent blog post The ultimate MySQL high availability solution and many benchmarks and functional tests I've done while evaluating these technologies.

At Percona Live I will also give a second talk Fixed in Drizzle: No more GOTCHA's. It looked like none of the Drizzle core team would be able to attend the conference and as I was going to be there I volunteered to cover a Drizzle topic at the same time. This is a talk Stewart Smith has given a few times at earlier conferences which I liked and proposed to Percona. As it turns out, also Stewart will be in London after all, so there will be 2 Drizzle talks, I will still give the one I'm committed to.

In July I wrote a blog post MySQL community counseling: talking about your feelings. It was triggered by an earlier blog post and followup threads on Google plus by Monty Taylor, Andrew Hutchings, etc... (everyone involved in that outburst have apologized and moved on long ago). I wanted to use that opportunity to highlight what I call our hidden trauma related to the Oracle acquisition of Sun, things that I still hear being discussed today, 2 years later, and things that I consider unresolved or unsolved that I see causing friction and misunderstandings - the kind of which that outburst too represented. Both before and after writing it I wondered if it was a good idea to publish it - I wondered whether I would be seen as helping to solve the problem or just contributing to it. I actually got some positive feedback about it, including from people at Oracle/MySQL (it's kind of a defense of Oracle, actually) so perhaps it wasn't all wrong. Thanks for that feedback by the way, it was really valuable to me.

A part of that post mentions three persons by name: Mårten Mickos, Zack Urlocker and Kaj Arnö. The post in general is not about any of them and they appear mostly as historical MySQL figures, while the post is about the current situation in the MySQL community and in particular how we are still dealing (or not dealing) with events related to the Oracle acquisition. Each of them appear only in a few sentences. Perhaps that brevity is also part of the problem, as you'll see, this post certainly will not be too short. But nevertheless, if you happen to focus on those specific sentences instead of the rest of the post, they do read as quite grave accusations against these persons - perhaps more than any others against Mårten.

Which is also a bit ironic, because whenever I have talked in private conversations about Mårten's open letter to Neelie Kroes, I always had only good things to say about him: