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

...

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.

Like in previous years, the winner's tonight have been selected based on public nominations and voted by a panel of respected members of the MySQL community. In fact, the panel consists of winners of this award from previous years.

This year the competition was very tough, I think that's because the community is so vibrant and there are so many great things happening. In fact we had to invite some alumni panelists to cast additional votes to break a 6-way tie in one category!

So let's start with the first category:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the Year 2012

Baron Schwartz

By his active blogging, speaking at conferences, and again this year by his authoring of the High Performance MySQL book, and being the architect behind the Percona Toolkit, Baron is not only a MySQL advocate but has pushed the state of the art of our understanding and capability in analyzing database performance. More importantly though, the panel wanted to acknowledge his consistently positive attitude and communication towards all actors in the MySQL community.

Sheeri Kabral, Sarah Novotny, Gerardo Narvaja

Sheeri, Sarah and Gerardo are long time, well known advocates of the MySQL community, however the panel especially acknowledged their production of 87 episodes of the OurSQL podcast, a professionally produced and popular podcast about all things MySQL.

James Day

James was nominated for 'MySQL advocacy and swimming upstream to keep people informed about bugs and other issues.' When looking into James' activities in the community, the panel first didn't find much evidence to support an award. For instance, unlike most winners, he is not a frequent blogger on Planet MySQL. But when digging deeper it became clear that James' instead is a very active commenter on everyone else's blogs, contributing in depth additional information to the community dialogue. James therefore is an excellent example of the kind of helpful support person that tirelessly helps everyone he meets in their use of MySQL.

James lives in the UK and was unfortunately not able to travel here to receive the award in person. However, he sent this greeting by email: "That's the idea. Philosophically it's nice to be helpful rather than trying to be prominent."

MySQL Community Awards: Application of the Year 2012

Pinterest

Pinterest is a successful and rapidly growing social networking startup that has taken MySQL from serving a few thousand users to beyond 10 million users as of today. It allows you to "pin" pictures you find on other websites, of items that you are interested in, and apparently often items that you are interested in buying. As such it is not surprising my wife is a Pinterest user too.

Dropbox

In a world with more and more devices, Dropbox makes the users' lives easier by making your files automatically available on all of them. With over 50 million users, it is the leading service of its kind. The usefulness of this service is perhaps also seen in the fact that it is estimated to have 10% market share in the category of backup software. Judging by the number of MySQL backup scripts available, it is also a popular way to backup your MySQL databases.

Xtrabackup Manager

The panel wanted to award Xtrabackup Manager for filling a void and bringing the MySQL community a fully open source backup manager that supports Xtrabackup.

MySQL Community Awards: Corporate Contributor of the Year 2012

O'Reilly Media

With this award, the panel wishes to acknowledge the O'Reilly Media team for many years of support for MySQL, the LAMP stack and the whole open source phenomenon that MySQL is part of.

Monty Program

With this award the panel wishes to acknowledge Monty Program for pushing the state of the art of the MySQL optimizer, as seen in the work on handling complex sub-queries in the recently released MariaDB 5.3, and generally for contributing to the MySQL ecosystem via driving the MariaDB project.

Oracle's MySQL Community team

With this award the panel wishes to acknowledge the Oracle MySQL Community team especially for the free tech tours and developer workshops they arrange around the world and their participation at conferences of many kinds. This MySQL evangelization reaches a unique audience, many of whom are not yet very familiar with MySQL.

And speaking of tech tours, we have here tonight Ronald Bradford who is an Oracle ACE Director and works closely with the MySQL community team as a speaker at these events. He will be accepting the award on behalf of Oracle, Dave and Keith also sent their thanks and greetings.