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.

This is just a friendly reminder that you can nominate your favorite MySQL community member, application and company for the traditional awards. The nominations must be in by the end of this week, after which the panel votes on them:

https://openlife.cc/blogs/2011/march/call-nominations-2011-oreilly-mysq…

I've seen at least a few people on IRC that were thinking of sending in nominations, now is a good time to do it!

The address is mysql.awards [at] gmail.com

The headline above could fit in a tweet, but Drizzle making its first release almost 3 years after the project started deserves a blog post.

Brian Aker has a long blog post looking back at these 3 years (and even longer into MySQL history). Stewart Smith has an entertaining personal perspective. .frm files, I will not miss you (if I were to start using Drizzle, that is). Planet Drizzle has an avalanche of posts from most Drizzle devs celebrating this event.

My recent account of The State of MySQL forks seems to have gotten quite a lot of attention. I promised to follow up with a separate piece about Drizzle and also PostgreSQL, as the other major open source database, so I'd better keep that promise now.

LWN.net has a nice article on their front page on Drizzle's and MariaDB's recent beta and RC releases. it is behind a paywall for a few more days, but using the link below you can already read it.

LWN.net: New releases from MySQL descendants Drizzle and MariaDB

For years, MySQL has been the highest-profile open source relational database system, but with the Sun (and, later, Oracle) acquisition of MySQL's corporate parent MySQL AB, the development community has split in several directions. Now, a few years later, both of the leading community-driven forks of MySQL, Drizzle and MariaDB, have made important new releases.

...

The Friday after the official MySQL conference was double booked. In parallel with the storage engine summit, Drizzle Developer Day 2010 was also happening. This event took the form of a hackathon, with free form discussions and hands on coding. I popped in, to experience the energy.

My conclusion both from Brian's keynote and the Developer Day is that: