At the end of today’s Clash of the DB Egos keynote, I had the pleasure of delivering the following speech:

Monty: When I was a child, my father used to work for the same company as Mike Smith [1] works for now. He told me about the concept of an IBM Fellow, which is considered to be the highest honour a technologist at IBM can achieve. Some of them are Nobel Prize winners, you get the picture. Today, MySQL has decided to honour you, for your work so far, and for the work we hope you will put in for the benefit of MySQL and its Community for many years to come. Thank you for creating MySQL, and for making meaning (like Guy Kawasaki spoke about yesterday [2]). You, Monty, have made all of this possible: the storage engines, the ecosystem, the conference. You’ve inspired and continue to inspire millions of users around the world, whom you’ve given a reliable, performant, and easy to use database that is available and affordable for all. While you might still have to work on the Nobel Prize, you are now the world’s first MySQL Fellow.

Tack [3], Monty!

[1] Mike Smith is the Chief Architect for DB2 and i5/OS and an IBM Distinguished Engineer, as well as an Ego in the Clash keynote
[2] Guy Kawasaki gave a keynote about The Art of Innovation
[3] “Thank you” in Swedish.

Mårten Mickos, MySQL’s CEO, has just handed out the 2007 MySQL Community Awards. Given the growth of the Community last year, we had a number of very good contributors that we would really have wished to honour. This time, our choice fell upon these three community members, to which we stand greatly indebted:

Quality Contributor of the Year: Martin Friebe

“This awards recognizes an individual who has displayed remarkable efforts to not just find and isolate bugs in MySQL, but to provide good test cases and several times actually fix the bug and send us a patch. This individual scores the highest number of points in our Quality Contributor Program officially launched in January.”

Community Code Contributor of the Year: Paul McCullagh, author of the PBXT Storage Engine

“In recognition of outstanding efforts in contributing code and knowledge to the MySQL Community, this award is given to an individual who has not just provided the community with an entire transactional, ACID compliant Storage Engine with a specialty in BLOBs, but also integrated into MySQL’s Architecture of Participation to the degree of providing mentoring on MySQL Summer of Code and replying on the internals@ mailing list with precise answers on the inner workings of MySQL.”

Community Advocate, Communicator and Facilitator of the Year: Sheeri Kritzer

“Recognising achievement in the arena of communicating, connecting individuals, arranging meetings, and being a vocal advocate of MySQL community interests, this individual deserves the longest title of all MySQL Community Award Winners of 2007. This individual has made great contributions through MySQL Camp, through blogs, and seems to be able to respond instantaneously with plenty of insight.”

Thank you, Martin, Paul and Sheeri!

Lenz made a good summary of the DotOrg Pavilion exhibitors at the Expo part of the MySQL Conference & Expo ten days from now. To recap, the DotOrg Pavilion is a part of the exhibition area reserved for Open Source projects. Our attempt has been to collect the DotOrg pavilion to be a mecca for OSS enthusiasts, writers, speakers, and advocates. We are fortunate to have attracted some of the world’s most recognised free software organisations, and new up and coming projects.

A related type of reason to register for the conference are the BOF sessions. Birds of a Feather sessions are the informal evening sessions where people sharing an interest meet face to face. You can still organise your own BoF. There are sixteen BoFs already:

BoFs Monday evening 23 April 2007

• MySQL Data Warehousing and BI, Lance Walter, V.P. Marketing, Pentaho Corporation

BoFs Tuesday evening 24 April 2007

• Backup and Recovery of MySQL, Paddy Sreenivasan, VP of Engineering and Co-founder, Zmanda, Inc., Zmanda, Inc.
• Using Perl’s DBD::mysql, Giuseppe Maxia, QA Developer, MySQL AB
• SNMP/AgentX Management of MySQL Servers, Mark Atwood
• MySQL Replication, Lars Thalmann, Replication and Clustering Technology, MySQL, Jeremy Cole, MySQL Geek, Proven Scaling LLC, Mats Kindahl, MySQL AB
• Testing Tools and Techniques, Giuseppe Maxia, QA Developer, MySQL AB
• Scalable BLOB Streaming Infrastructure, Paul McCullagh, CTO, SNAP Innovation GmbH
• Performance Tuning and Optimization, Peter Zaitsev, Co-Founder, Lead Consultant, Percona Ltd, Tobias Asplund, Instructor and Performance Tuning Consultant, MySQL AB, Jay Pipes, Community Relations Manager, North America, MySQL AB

BoFs Wednesday evening 25 April 2007

• MySQL Cluster (NDB), Stewart Smith, Cluster Developer, MySQL AB
• Quality Contribution to MySQL, Giuseppe Maxia, QA Developer, MySQL AB
• Making It Real in the Enterprise: Migrating from Access to Enterprise Web 2.0
• All Things .NET, Reggie Burnett, Software Developer, MySQL AB
• MySQL and Java, Mark D. Matthews, MySQL AB
• Online Backup, Lars Thalmann, Replication and Clustering Technology, MySQL, Charles Bell, Senior Developer, MySQL AB
• Pluggable Storage Engine API, Brian Miezejewski, Principal Consultant, MySQL Inc., Brian Aker, Director of Architecture, MySQL AB, Trudy Pelzer, Project Engineering Manager, MySQL AB
• MySQL Monitoring and Advisory Service Unleashed—Come Make Your Mark!, Andy Bang, Director of MySQL Network, MySQL, Rob Young, Senior Product Manager, MySQL Network

Please check the “Birds of a Feather Sessions” message board located in the Conference Registration Area for up-to-the-minute changes and information.

There has been some late updates to our Keynote sessions for the Users Conference. The keynotes presentations are given Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in the morning for the entire conference audience, in the combined Ballrooms E-H. I think we have quite an exciting group of visionaries, technologists and influentials:

Tuesday morning keynotes 24 April 2007

• 8:20-9:05: Welcome and State of MySQL AB, Mårten Mickos, MySQL AB, CEO gives an update on how MySQL AB is doing, including a view behind the scenes of the business, the vision, the phenomenal growth, and some of the plans for the future.
• 9:05-9:50: The Art of Innovation, Guy Kawasaki You’re familiar with his top-ranking blog How to change the world - a practical blog for impractical people? Let’s see if he can demonstrate How to get a standing ovation at his keynote!
• 9:50-10:20: Building the Ultimate Database Container with RHEL, MySQL, and Virtualization, Brian Stevens, CTO and Vice President of Engineering, Red Hat.

Wednesday morning keynotes 25 April 2007

• 8:20-9:05: Freedom Businesses Protect Privacy, Eben Moglen, Director, Software Freedom Law Center. As Stewart Smith notes, it’s probably worth the conference admission fee just to see this session. Few people can grab an audience with world-changing opinions and wit, like Eben. Do also read Jay’s posting Getting Drunk with Eben Moglen, about why Free Beer isn’t so good if your data are getting drunk.
• 9:05-9:50: The Clash of the Database Egos, Kaj Arnö interviewing Michael (Monty) Widenius, CTO & Co-founder, MySQL AB, Mikael Ronström, Senior Software Architect, MySQL AB, Jim Starkey, Senior Software Architect, MySQL AB, plus partner egos Heikki Tuuri, Innobase Oy / Oracle, Ari Valtanen, Co-Founder, Senior VP and CTO, Solid, and Paul Whittington, Founder and Chief Architect, NitroSecurity. Expect an entertaining fight, as Jay describes and as I wrote earlier.
• 9:50-10:20: Citizenship: Open Source Community Rewards and Responsibilities, Bdale Garbee, Linux CTO, Hewlett Packard.

Thursday morning keynotes 26 April 2007

• 8:20-9:05: PHP on Hormones, Rasmus Lerdorf, Yahoo!: To build a successful web application you have to engage the user so that every action enhances the overall user experience. Rasmus will show how to translate this concept into code that scales.
• 9:05-9:50: Scaling MySQL at YouTube, Paul Tuckfield, MySQL DBA, YouTube. If you’re like me, you’re curious about such a huge site was built!
• 9:50-10:20: Data Protection for the LAMP Economy, Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda.

See you there!

Google just released the list of accepted Summer of Code projects. Overall, Google accepted over 900 student applicants from a pool of nearly 6,200 applications. Out of those, Google accepted 10 MySQL related applications from nearly 40 applications.

I am happy to see the following successful applicants from the US, the EU, Europe outside the EU, and China:

• Charles Cahoon
• Jin Chen
• Umair Mehmood Imam
• Vangelis Katsikaros
• Warren Kenny
• Senlin Liang
• Mikkel Bach Mortensen
• Milos Prodanovic
• Mayssam Sayyadian
• Andrew Uvarov

and the following mentors (all of whom you can meet in less than two weeks at the MySQL Conference & Expo 23-26 April 2007 in Santa Clara, most of them as speakers) from various groups in MySQL Engineering, and from outside MySQL AB:

• Brian Aker
• Colin Charles
• Timour Katchaounov
• Sheeri Kritzer
• Giuseppe Maxia
• Paul McCullagh
• Stewart Smith
• Jim Starkey

The projects include all the ones I mentioned two weeks ago, and a few more:

1. A performance analysis and anomaly detection tool for database engine, by Jin Chen, mentored by Paul McCullagh
2. MySQL Load Testing, aka. How hard can I really push this? by Charles Cahoon, mentored by Giuseppe Maxia
3. MySQLXplorer: Enabling Keyword Search in MySQL Applications by Mayssam Sayyadian, mentored by James A. Starkey
4. Exploring MySQL’s SQL optimizer by Vangelis Katsikaros, mentored by Timour Katchaounov
5. MySQL Auditing Software by Warren Kenny, mentored by Sheeri Kritzer
6. MySQL Based Atom Store by Mikkel Bach Mortensen, mentored by Brian Aker
7. MySQL Auditing Software by Umair Mehmood Imam, mentored by Sheeri Kritzer
8. MyWebER by Andrew Uvarov, mentored by Colin Charles
9. IPv6 network support by Milos Prodanovic, mentored by Brian Aker
10. MySQL Test Suite Development by Senlin Liang, mentored by Stewart E Smith

Participating in the Google Summer of Code is a crucial step for MySQL in extending the ways in which we are working together with our community. We’ve always been privileged to have an engaged community when it comes to contributing bug reports and helping other users, but this is our first significant step towards systematically working with the community when it comes to code contributions. Some of our best developers are allocated as mentors, and the projects include exciting new tasks that, if successfully implemented, directly extend the very core of the MySQL server code base.

Already at this point, when the Summer of Code is just starting, a number of persons deserve a special thank you note:

• Thank you, Jin, Umair, Vangelis, Warren, Senlin, Mikkel, Milos, Mayssam, and Andrew, for your great applications — and congratulations on being accepted! Thanks also to the other applicants, whose applications weren’t accepted. Better luck next time!
• Thank you, Sheeri and Paul, for mentoring projects, even though you are not employed by MySQL! It’s a true privilege that in our first Summer of Code, our community is strong enough to even provide mentors, helping others.
• Thank you, Brian, Colin, Timour, Giuseppe, Stewart, and Jim, for taking the time to be mentors, on top of your “normal” duties for MySQL!
• Thank you, Sheeri and Brian, for mentoring two projects each!
• Thank you, Jeffrey Pugh, VP Engineering of MySQL, for allowing and encouraging the MySQL engineers to be mentors!
• Thank you, Colin, for coordinating and arranging MySQL’s participation in the Google Summer of Code!

And above all, thank you, Google, for setting up the Google Summer of Code!