A new start always provides an opportunity to reassess your way of doing things:

• “Am I doing the right things with my life?”
• “Which habits could I change — in order to be a better neighbour?” 

Since Karen Tegan Padir took over the MySQL product from Mårten Mickos, we at Sun have taken a thorough look in the mirror.  The result of this introspection allows us to publish our conclusions and new community commitments this week in conjunction with the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara. 

For those who don’t yet know Karen, let me state a few facts: 

• Karen is VP of Sun’s newly-founded MySQL & Software Infrastructure group
• She describes herself as a geek and a straight-shooter, and I can attest to both 
• She was deeply involved in Sun’s decision to acquire MySQL, as well as the subsequent integration work throughout 2008 

In my previous blog, ”MySQL Culture and Business Philosophy Goes Mainstream at Sun“, I stressed that the key point to remember is that Sun is completely committed to building a big open source-based business, and very much supportive of the various communities that Sun is engaged in. That may sound a bit abstract, so I have worked with my new boss, Karen, to spell out for the MySQL community what it actually means in practice: 

First: We shall now start releasing MySQL Community Server binaries as frequently as we release the MySQL Enterprise Server. We want everyone – community and customers — to get the best bits first from us. This is why future Monthly Rapid Updates of MySQL 5.1 will remain available for the community. Moreover, future MRUs of MySQL 5.0 will also become available for the community. 

Second: We shall focus even more on our traditional core product values of stability, Performance and Ease of Use. Like you, we hate bugs, we hate slow, we hate waiting for fixes, and we hate awkward usability — even more than we love new functionality. The MySQL 5.4 performance release, which is considerably faster than MySQL 5.0 or 5.1 in most use cases, is a case in point.

Third: We shall allocate additional resources to the health and well-being of the MySQL Community. We focus both on users and developers. We shall now devote a greater portion of our internal MySQL Engineering Team resources to reviewing and eventually merging architecturally-compatible features written by external contributors, even if those features weren’t on our own roadmap.

Finally, fourth: We shall do more to improve our internal software engineering practices. We will brush our teeth every morning and evening, exercise several times a week, and eat (mostly) healthy food. Some of us may at times still take a vodka shot, but if so, then only to be social and to provide an excuse for singing badly, but not while writing code. 

In the spirit of open-ness, please give us ideas on how we can implement these changes. Let the MySQL community team know what you think. For those at the show this week, stop Karen in the halls and introduce yourself. Above all, enjoy!

Given the changes announced this week, I have updated my original plans for my presentation on Sunday. I was going to talk about Social networking, but am now changing it to a very interactive Q&A session.

I expect people are asking themselves

• What has changed?
• What will happen now?
• What are the consequences for the MySQL roadmap?
• Are there other consequences for the MySQL community?

and I will attempt at answering these questions interactively during FOSDEM.

Towards the end of next week, after internal coordination, I plan to share some further thinking on the “what will happen now” front with my blog readers.

What also I plan to do during tomorrow’s FOSDEM session is to get plenty of feedback on internal thoughts about what the community expects from us. My aim is to ask the right questions. My aim is to listen. My aim is to be able to use the FOSDEM feedback in our own planning at Sun. My aim is not yet to give answers to what Sun will do to accommodate your feedback, not even in the blog towards end of next week. At least partial answers can be expected at the MySQL Conference & Expo 20-23 April 2009 in California, though.

Summary: Travel to Brussels, come to FOSDEM, follow the signs for the “AW Building”, and go to the MySQL room AW1.126 in time before the start 13:15 tomorrow Sunday 8.2.2009. And tell us what you want Sun to do with MySQL!

MySQL 5.1 is here! It’s announced! And it’s time for the overall winner, Position 1 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

1. Greg Haase (Lotame Solutions Inc., Elkridge, Maryland, USA): Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler to Prune Archive Tables. See Greg’s DevZone article, and his blog.

Thanks and congratulations, Greg! I absolutely hope you are in a position to take advantage of your free MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius.

Links:

• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/18/mysql-51-use-case-competition/
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/08/26/mysql-51-use-case-competition-until-end-of-september
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/partitioning-event_scheduler.html
• http://blog.onefreevoice.com/

With the GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 coming up, we have picked the winners in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

To keep you in suspense, let me first announce those on positions 5 to 10:

5. Fourat Zouari (TriTUX.com, Tunis, Tunisia): Using Partitioning for Data Warehousing. See Fourat’s DevZone article, and his blog entry from May 2008.

6. Ryan Thiessen (Big Fish Games, Seattle, Washington, USA): Logging Game Downloads with Partitioning. See Ryan’s DevZone article.

7. Christopher Lavigne (Breadboard BI, Inc., Pleasanton, California, USA): Using MySQL 5.1 for Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence. See Christopher’s DevZone article.

8. Jianzy Zhaoyang (Alibaba.com, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China): Using the MySQL 5.1 Event Scheduler for an Online Chat System. When Jian’s ongoing migration is done, he has promised a DevZone article.

9. Jakub Vrána (phpMinAdmin, Prague, Czech Republic): Managing Events in phpMinAdmin. See Lenz Grimmer’s blog entry.

10. Santo Leto (HoneySoftware, Trieste, Italy): 5.1 Use Case Reports. See Santo’s blog entries.

Thanks an congratulations, Fourat, Ryan, Christopher, Jian, Jakub and Santo! Your MySQL Community Contributor T-shirts are underway.

Links:

• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/18/mysql-51-use-case-competition/
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/08/26/mysql-51-use-case-competition-until-end-of-september
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/tritux_partitioning_datawarehousing.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/big_fish_games_partitioning.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/breadboardbi_data_warehouse.html

We’re getting some high quality Use Cases from our user base, related to the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

The first one is by Greg Haase of Lotame, based in Elkridge, Maryland (USA), a company dedicated to providing solutions within social media. His article is about an innovative use of MySQL 5.1 partitioning and Event Scheduler to prune ARCHIVE tables.

There are more articles in the pipeline. And there is still time for you to submit your story by 30 September 2008. We’re all excited to read them, and with your permission, we’ll share them with our user base.

Links:

• Greg Haase’s article Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler to Prune Archive Tables: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/partitioning-event_scheduler.html
• Greg’s blog about Databases and Linux: http://blog.onefreevoice.com/
• The MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition announcement: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-5.1-use-case-competition.html

We timed our Use Case Competition to coincide with summer holidays, and are now prolonging the duration of the Use Case Competition with one month, until 30 September 2008.

To recap, here’s the original posting (with an updated deadline):

With 5.1 having officially been in Release Candidate status since September 2007 and soon approaching GA status, the MySQL Community Team launches a competition for the users of new features of MySQL 5.1:

Submit your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report to community(at)mysql.com by 30 September 2008 and have a chance of winning one of our prizes:

• 1st-3rd prize: A MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius
• 4th-10th prize: MySQL Community Contributor T-shirts
• 11th-20th prize: A Sakila mascot (MySQL’s pet dolphin)

You may phrase your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report freely, but the more colour you give it, the better your chances of winning.

By submitting the report, you also volunteer for appearing in our upcoming Use Case articles. We will consider any data you submit in your Use Case Report as public and quotable in our reports. However, you may ask us to anonymise certain aspects of your use case, should you otherwise not be able to participate in our competition.

This is the desired format of your submissions:

From: <you>
To: Community(at)mysql.com
Cc: <any of your colleagues you wish to inform>
Subject: MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report: <Feature> / <App Name>

MySQL Community Team,

At <company/organisation> we've used <new 5.1 feature> since <date>.

We're now on MySQL 5.1.<n> and we started development using
<new 5.1 feature> with MySQL.5.1.<m>.

Purpose of our appication:

Reason we need <new 5.1 feature>:

Development environment, OS, language:

Deployment environment, OS, hardware:

Relevant metrics on size/type of application:

Our comment on how <new 5.1 feature> meets our needs:
- comments on usability of feature
- comments on clarity of documentation
- comments on performance
- comments on bugs encountered [1]

Our greetings to the MySQL Engineering Team:

Name and email of submitter / developer:

Name of organisation:

Geographic location (city, country):

MySQL Enterprise customer: (YES/NO)

[1] If you’ve found bugs, then please follow our bug reporting instructions and share bug numbers from bugs.mysql.com in your use case report.

We’re looking for Use Cases on all new MySQL 5.1 features, but especially on

• Partitioning: Doc * Forum * Articles JonS & PeterG, RobinS, RS2, Giuseppe
• Row-Based Replication: Doc * Forum
• Event Scheduler: Doc * Forum
• Logs on demand / Table logging: Doc * Forum * Article Giuseppe
• Plugin API: Doc
• XML functions: Doc * Article: Bar & PeterG
• but also other improvements: Doc *Article Jay

Links:

• MySQL 5.1 Article Recap: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-5.1-recap.html

If you for some reason missed the news yesterday: Symbian, the largest mobile operating system, will soon be Open Source. The software will be made available “over the next two years” and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

Looking at the Symbian press release:

Mobile leaders to unify the Symbian software platform and set the future of mobile free

Foundation to be established to provide royalty-free open platform and accelerate innovation

LONDON, UK; June 24, 2008 - Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS™, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone they plan to establish the Symbian Foundation to extend the appeal of this unified software platform. Membership of this non-profit Foundation will be open to all organizations. This initiative is supported by current shareholders and management of Symbian Limited, who have been actively involved in its development. Plans for the Foundation have already received wide support from other industry leaders.

To enable the Foundation, Nokia today announced plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola today announced their intention to contribute technology from UIQ and DOCOMO has also indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. From these contributions, the Foundation will provide a unified platform with common UI framework. A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty-free license, from the Foundation’s first day of operations.

Many commentators, such as TechCrunchIT, think this is a good move by Nokia. Om Malik has a good analysis of the likely background reasoning.

Personally, I’m a happy Symbian user (Nokia E61i) and certainly welcome the move. Hey, Symbian’s market share is already well over half of the mobile market. This is a move in the right direction, at the right moment in time.

Ah, and did I mention that MySQL runs on Symbian?

Thanks, Nokia!

Links:

• Symbian enlightened by LAMP (entry on my blog from Dec 2007): http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2007/12/10/symbian-enlightened-by-lamp/
• Symbian press release: http://www.symbian.com/news/pr/2008/pr200810018.html
• TechCrunchIT / Nik Cubrilovic: http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/06/24/symbian-goes-open-source-courtesy-of-nokia/
• Om Malik — Symbian, iPhone & the New Mobile Reality: http://gigaom.com/2008/06/24/symbian-iphone-the-new-mobile-reality/

During the last month, MySQL code has been migrated from BitKeeper to Bazaar. Bazaar is a distributed, free revision control system sponsored and supported by Canonical, the company behind the fast-growing Linux distribution Ubuntu.

We have migrated all MySQL code trees that were available in BitKeeper. This means not just current GA and development versions of MySQL Server and MySQL Cluster, but also the history all the way back to MySQL 3.23.22 released about eight years ago. And we’ve also migrated non-MySQL-server FOSS applications to Bazaar, such as MySQL Workbench (formerly not in BitKeeper but in Subversion, also known as svn) and our internal QA suites.

We would like to thank BitKeeper for the fruitful relationship that has lasted for 5 years. BitKeeper has helped MySQL to achieve its goals in a professional way and to scale from simple version control to a more productive workflow.

Despite BitKeeper’s strong features, we wanted to find a more open product, since our goal remains to expand our external contributor base. For that, we need a freely distributable product to build a new policy of cooperation. For this, BitKeeper had published a free client for the community; however, this client is unfortunately limited to a few read-only operations. The community has been asking for more functionality, and we have taken these requests to heart.

It is because of our commitment to the development community that we decided to switch. We can’t encourage contributions without providing the appropriate tools for the task. Before opting for Bazaar, we evaluated several candidate Revision Control Systems, looking for the following features:

• ease of use for a distributed development organization
• feature set compatible with BitKeeper
• availability in all major operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris).

All the above requirements have played a decisive role in our choice, and countless email messages have been exchanged in the internal mailing lists to weight the pros and cons of replacement candidates. In the end, the features and openness of Bazaar was agreed to be the best alternative. The engineers at Canonical, under former MySQLer Elliot Murphy’s guidance, have worked wonders in adapting Bazaar to what they know about our requirements. Bazaar has been under intense development lately, resulting in 5 releases that have enhanced and stabilized the product since January, and these fixes have been of great benefit to us.

Side note: After being acquired by Sun, we learned that Sun will standardise on Mercurial. However, our decision on Bazaar was in the works already before MySQL was acquired and won’t affect Sun’s policy.

What is in it for the MySQL community? A more open environment for sharing MySQL code, and for working on it. Using Launchpad (http://launchpad.net), the Bazaar public web interface, Sun can now offer a better code repository for internal and external work on MySQL. This repository is now available at http://launchpad.net/mysql-server.

For readers not familiar with Bazaar and Launchpad, I recommend Canonical’s Projects page for clarifications. However, do note one thing: That page says that “Launchpad is a collaborative system developed by Canonical, and used to keep track of many aspects of open source development including bug tracking.”. We’re using Launchpad as a code repository, but we’ll continue to use our own same bug tracking system, at http://bugs.mysql.com.

The “Installing from the Development Source Tree” chapter of the MySQL 5.1 manual has been updated to reflect the switch to Bazaar.

Over the weeks and months to come, you can expect articles and blog posts about how to work with Bazaar. As we are still in the infancy of this new experience, we will welcome community advice and articles on this matter. Please contact us at ‘community’ ‘AT’ ‘mysql’ ‘DOT’ ‘com’, or just blog about your thoughts. We are listening!

Links:

• BitKeeper: http://www.bitkeeper.com
• Bazaar: http://bazaar-vcs.org
• Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com
• Canonical: http://www.canonical.com
• Canonical’s Projects page: http://www.canonical.com/projects
• Launchpad: http://launchpad.net
• MySQL’s code repository: http://launchpad.net/mysql-server
• MySQL’s related projects: http://launchpad.net/mysql
• Elliot Murphy’s Launchpad page: https://launchpad.net/~statik
• MySQL 5.1 Manual page: “Installing from the Development Source Tree” http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/installing-source-tree.html
• Daniel Fischer’s article “Getting started with Bazaar for MySQL code“: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/getting-started-with-bazaar-for-mysql.html

The upcoming 5.1.25 release will see a change with regards to MySQL Cluster:

MySQL 5.1.25 binaries will be released without Cluster support.

This is due to a change in the development cycle of MySQL Cluster. The work on Cluster specific features is largely independent from the rest of the MySQL Server, which has resulted in our decision to release MySQL Cluster separately from the rest of the MySQL Server, effective with MySQL 5.1.25.

This change just goes for the binaries, though. Let me reassure you that:

• Sun is still releasing MySQL Cluster under the GPL, as before.
• MySQL 5.1 source code will still include Cluster, and you can download and compile it with Cluster, if you wish.

The only change is that we’re now releasing two separate packages.

MySQL Cluster is being developed and maintained at a different pace, compared to the regular server. In addition, we have learned that our current users of MySQL Cluster are not as concerned about the regular server’s features. Typical Cluster customer installations rely mostly on updated cluster features. Many users of Cluster use the direct API rather than the SQL interface.

We hope this division will bring benefits for all parties involved:

• Cluster releases will be happening more quickly, as Cluster releases are fairly independent of MySQL Server releases. With new releases of MySQL Cluster no longer tied to the release of the regular server, cluster users will get their updates as soon as the Cluster software is updated, regardless of whether the regular server is being patched or not.
• The new Cluster package includes the Carrier Grade Edition, which contains a juicy list of features (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-cluster-changes-5-1-ndb-6-2.html).
• Users of the main MySQL Server will now be able to download a smaller package with a quicker test suite. This should really help those with low bandwidth connections.

The change is evident when you look at the developer zone (http://dev.mysql.com) where MySQL Cluster uses a different release numbering scheme from MySQL Server, and is labeled 6.2.15. This is not the regular server version. 6.2.15 is the Cluster version, and this package is based on MySQL 5.1.

Bug fixes to the Cluster will be ported to the main server when appropriate. Bug fixes to the main server will be merged to the Cluster sources on a regular basis.

Finally, where shall you turn for the downloads?

• If you need MySQL binaries with Cluster enabled, there is a specific downloads page http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/#mysql-cluster
• MySQL Server (slimmer now, without the NDB binaries), is available as always at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/

Friday afternoon, I met with Tetsuro Ikeda-san and Teruyoshi Hazama-san of MySQL’s long-time key partner in Japan, Sumisho. Ikeda-san and Hazama-san taught me about their work on full text search in Japanese.

Senna is an engine for fast full text search in Japanese. The Senna project derives its name from Formula I driver Ayrton Senna. “But he’s dead”, I protested. “Sure, but he is a legend and will always be associated with speed.” I cannot protest there — and the numbers I saw for Senna’s full-text search defend the choice of name.

Tritonn is the combination of Senna into MySQL. The Tritonn name refers to two things: Triton Square in Tokyo, where Sumisho has its offices, and to the fact that MySQL through our dolphin logotype is associated with the sea. Tritonn is spelt with two n’s in order to simplify web search, so as not to be confused with the Greek god Triton (the messenger of the deep, son of Poseidon, god of the sea) and the many other things named after him.

I recommended Hazama-san to meet at the MySQL Users Conference with key guys in MySQL Engineering: Sergei Golubchik who wrote MySQL’s Full-Text Search feature, Peter Gulutzan who knows all there is to be known about standards and character sets, and Alexander Barkov who implements all there is to be implemented about character sets.

Good luck to Senna and Tritonn!

References:

• Tritonn home page: http://qwik.jp/tritonn/about_en.html