The past few years of MySQL conferences...

Every year since Oracle's acquisition of MySQL in 2009, there's been some uncertainty around the annual MySQL conference, which used to be co-organized by MySQL AB (in charge of content) and O'Reilly (conference logistics). As my career unfolded during those years, I've seen relatively close how the conferences of 2010 and 2011 happened. As there's been a lot of re-structuring in the community around various forks and new employers, I've felt that the annual conference was the one thing that kept us together, the one common forum where everyone would meet. For this reason I have been personally very engaged (as have many others) in helping O'Reilly get through the conferences of 2010 and 2011 and I'm very grateful to Tim, Gina and the rest of the O'Reilly team that they have provided us with this forum and gravitation point for the past two years.

During this years conference it was openly speculated that it would be the last O'Reilly MySQL conference. EnterpriseDB being the main sponsor at a MySQL conference... kind of gave you a hint. With Oracle constantly boycotting and refusing to sponsor the conference of its own community, the business justification for O'Reilly to keep going just wasn't there anymore.

So once again we were facing uncertainty of what to do next year.

When we have been discussing alternatives for the next MySQL conference, I always maintained there are 3 things from which people recognize the MySQL conference: time, location and name. So I was encouraging people to come up with solutions that would maintain those 3 variables as constant as possible.

Slides from my talk at OSCON 2011 are now up on Slideshare:

Last week Monty Taylor wrote an interesting blog post Oracle do not, in fact, comprise the total set of MySQL Experts where he protested against the title of Oracle's new podcast series Meet The MySQL Experts. Now, when I say "interesting" I'm not really referring to the factual argument he is making...

What was interesting about this was to see Monty burst out like that and express some true human feelings. Through all the controversies we've seen around MySQL, the Drizzle team has made a point of staying out of such discussions and just working on cleaning up their code and adding cool new stuff (added as plugins, of course). And if anything, I would have expected it to be someone like Stewart to finally break and start ranting about something, if it were to happen...

Just to be clear: I do not actually agree with Monty on the factual topic he is raising. We are of course all very geeky and arguing about English grammar is a good way to relax, but as far as I'm concerned it is quite common for titles of podcasts and such to be shortened versions of the full, grammatically correct sentence whose meaning the are conveying. After all, it would be silly to have a podcast called "Meet the MySQL experts who work in Oracle's R&D department, but excluding those experts that do work at Oracle's support or consulting organizations, even if they are great minds too, and also excluding anyone not working for Oracle at all."

I will be using this picture of the famous Korv Göran kebab grill in my talk at OSCON next week. They recently launched a new slogan "Bigger is better". I think they are on to something, at least when it comes to the kebab business.

Did you know that...

2 weeks from now I'm giving a talk How to Grow Your Open Source Project 10x and Revenues 5x at OSCON (in Portland, Oregon). It is based on the article with the same title I published last year. The talk is scheduled to end a one day sub-track called IT Leaders Summit. I'm glad it is categorized as a business talk rather than community talk - things I write usually are problematic in that I typically cover both business and community and see them mostly as harmonious topics, whereas most other people see them as opposites.

In December I covered the topic The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating (which was also a response to Giuseppe Maxia's take on the same topic). Since half a year has now passed, I was wondering if I should follow up with an update. (Drizzle having a GA release would be the major news in such an update.)

But I see that Peter Zaitsev covered this topic in the opening keynote of their Percona Live conference. Since I agree with Peter's view on this topic, I just recommend you watch the talk on Percona.TV. He also uses the same categorizations of the forks, and includes "community patches" as its separate slide.

There was a guy on TV (and unfortunately I've forgotten his name) who does crisis management and peace negotiations. You know, mediating when two countries or tribes have been at war. At the opening of peace negotiations he would usually tell the following story:

Some more recent readers of this blog perhaps never realized that it is a spin-off of a book I wrote years ago. I still write occasionally about open source business models and community stuff, but perhaps that is drowned by increasing amount of hard core database topics.

Reader Andrew Moore - who happens to be my collague at Nokia and a great DBA - has submitted a Kindle version of the book. I've now added it to the download page.

Thanks Andrew!

To round off my memoirs from the MySQL conference 2011, I'll just write down for the historical record my own activities.

MySQL awards

With the community picking up tasks that used to be handled by MySQL AB, it somehow has fallen on my lap to drive the selection of winners for the annual MySQL awards. This was the second year we did it and we have settled on a format where the winners are chosen by a community panel consisting of 2 previous years winners, plus the conference chair(s). I think having the community nominating and voting the winners have brought forward some truly deserving and sometimes also surprising winners, and it has been a pleasure to be involved in this process. I feel privileged to be part of a process channeling so much goodwill and respect from the MySQL community to the winners.

This year's winners were already published here previously.

Xtrabackup Manager BoF

Together with Lachlan we did a BoF on Xtrabackup Manager. There was a good group of people turning up. I didn't write down the name, but someone offered to participate by creating a browser based user interface, which XBM doesn't have yet. Peter Zaitsev stopped by for a word of encouragement even if he was also going to another BoF at the same time.

Friendly and without drama

That's a good way to summarize the MySQL conference 2011. Nobody acquired nobody. There were no volcanoes keeping men away from their wives, dads away from soon to be born babies. I had packed extra underwear just in case, but it wasn't needed.