MontyProgram

Leaving MariaDB/Monty Program

Last week I announced internally that after my paternity leave ends next year, I will not be returning to Monty Program.

When I joined the company over a year ago I was immediately involved in drafting a project plan for the Open Database Alliance and its relation to MariaDB. We wanted to imitate the model of the Linux Foundation and Linux project, where the MariaDB project would be hosted by a non-profit organization where multiple vendors would collaborate and contribute. We wanted MariaDB to be a true community project, like most successful open source projects are - such as all other parts of the LAMP stack.

3 Istanbul videos summarizing everything you need to know of MySQL and MariaDB development status

Monty with a bellydancer in Istanbul 2010
At the MariaDB developer meeting in Istanbul, we didn't yet tackle the logistics of filming and streaming the talks given, so if you weren't there, you have to be content with the blogs and slides published. I did however take the following 3 videos and now that I'm outside of Turkey's Internet firewall, I published them on YouTube. They are not technical at first sight, but if you think about it, they illustrate and summarize perfectly the current status of MySQL/MariaDB community development.

A MySQL-MariaDB playlist

Hakan and My have done an excellent job organizing our MariaDB developer meeting here in Istanbul. For the farewell dinner, Hakan asked what kind of music we'd like the DJ to play. I realized it is possible to compile a rather nice list of MySQL/MariaDB related music for an evening:

The return of the MySQL developer meeting

Galata Bridge, Istanbul

Just in case it wasn't clear from Hakan's post, we are opening up the next Monty Program company meeting in October 7-12 to be a general MariaDB developers meeting. (In fact, we've had a few guests in all of the previous meetings too, but now it's formal and public.) Ever since Sun folded this annual MySQL AB tradition (to save money) there has been people asking when the next meeting would be, since for the developer community outside MySQL AB it was the main networking and information sharing event of the year. Last MySQL user conference we agreed that something needs to be done, and this is it. If you work on any of the MySQL variants, a storage engine, or are otherwise interested in deep architectural MySQL/MariaDB discussions, you are welcome to join and should contact Hakan or My for details.1 The invitation of course also is valid for Oracle employees, in case you were wondering.

And that's the other significant news hiding in Hakan's post: My Widenius, an experienced traveller herself, will be in charge of meeting logistics. This means even My herself now works for MariaDB, and can be reached with my at mariadb dot org :-)

  • 1If you are a Drizzle hacker, it is probably less interesting, but you are of course still welcome if you come! Anyway, we did also discuss having a similar developer meeting adjacent to an OpenSQL camp or something that could cover broader topics, and this is still an option. But as it is now, this is a MySQL/MariaDB focused meeting and there already was a separate Drizzle Developer day and we can just see what else is needed.

My IFCLA banquet note about forking and IPR law

Below is my talk from the International Federation of Computer Law Associations conference banquet that took place in Helsinki last week. (It is post-edited to match what was actually said.)

I have to say I was quite honored to be asked to speak. I was preceded by Finlands Minister of Justice Tuija Brax and later in the evening followed by imho Finlands funniest magician Martti Vannas. The dinner was set in the old stock market building of Helsinki, an exquisite restaurant now. I'm happy to say the talk was well received and many of the lawyers came to thank me afterwards.

It's a girl!

Last Saturday I became father to a baby girl - in addition to our 2½year old son.

Those of you who are my former collagues from MySQL, you know about the generous Scandinavian 5 week vacations. (Which in MySQL were practiced globally.) I have decided that now is a good time for me to enjoy another Scandinavian perk: long paternity leave. I will be home with the rest of the family until approximately next February :-)

MySQLconf impressions 3: Report from Storage Engine Summit 2010

For the Friday after the MySQL conference, Oracle had invited all storage engines to the traditional storage engine summit, but this was then canceled (or postponed) in the last minute. Since the engine vendors had already booked the day anyway, we agreed to sponsor the facility so the meeting could take place. In addition to those who had planned to be there, the meeting was also attended by Mikael Ronström, Jonas Oreland and Sanja Byelkin who had their flights cancelled. (Oracle was already represented by Konstantin Osipov.)

Also see https://askmonty.org/wiki/Storage_Engine_Summit_2010 for more complete notes of the summit.

MySQLconf impressions 2: Thoughts on MySQL on top of NoSQL / Hadoop

We then finally came to the topic that comes naturally to anyone familiar with the MySQL architecture. Could Hadoop, or Hive, or whichever, be plugged into MySQL as a storage engine? And why would you want to do that? And can Timour's work to push down JOIN conditions be of any help? (The last question was interesting since Ted and his team were inherently against talking about JOINs at all :-)

We ended up concluding that 2 things could be interesting and considered "low hanging fruit":

SQL to PIG compiler.

(Btw, it is not immediately obvious if this task needs MySQL at all.)

MySQLconf impressions 1: May as well look into this NoSQL thing since we are stuck anyway

(This is the first in a series of blogs written while I was trying to get home from Santa Clara. Posting them now as I'm back home and online.)

These MySQL conferences certainly get more interesting every year. Last year we got acquired and I went home thinking I need to start looking for a new job. This year Eyjafjallajõkull erupted and I had trouble getting home at all!

Pre-conference there was also the suspense to see whether the conference will take place at all, but O'Reilly and Colin pulled it together perfectly! It seems most if not all Europeans will eventually find their ways home, so all in all, all is well that ends well.

To recount everything we've learned, I will step backwards in time through the highlights as I saw them.

Monty's keynote text from MySQL Conference 2010

Hi

Unusually, we actually wrote a text for Monty's keynote speech this year. I'm publishing it below. Part of the speaker notes are just bullet points though, but the text may still be interesting to publish. Also, there is a funny joke about Oracle being a major MariaDB contributor that Monty somehow missed in the speech.

The keynote is also available on Youtube. In fact, Sheeri has been nice enough to collect all videos from the conference into a playlist.

About the bookAbout this siteAcademicAccordAmazonAppleBeginnersBooksBuildBotBusiness modelsbzrCassandraCloudcloud computingclsCommunitycommunityleadershipsummitConsistencycoodiaryCopyrightCreative CommonscssDatabasesdataminingDatastaxDevOpsDistributed ConsensusDrizzleDrupalEconomyelectronEthicsEurovisionFacebookFrosconFunnyGaleraGISgithubGnomeGovernanceHandlerSocketHigh AvailabilityimpressionistimpressjsInkscapeInternetJavaScriptjsonKDEKubuntuLicensingLinuxMaidanMaker cultureMariaDBmarkdownMEAN stackMepSQLMicrosoftMobileMongoDBMontyProgramMusicMySQLMySQL ClusterNerdsNodeNoSQLNyrkiöodbaOpen ContentOpen SourceOpenSQLCampOracleOSConPAMPParkinsonPatentsPerconaperformancePersonalPhilosophyPHPPiratesPlanetDrupalPoliticsPostgreSQLPresalespresentationsPress releasesProgrammingRed HatReplicationSeveralninesSillySkySQLSolonStartupsSunSybaseSymbiansysbenchtalksTechnicalTechnologyThe making ofTransactionsTungstenTwitterUbuntuvolcanoWeb2.0WikipediaWork from HomexmlYouTube