What is the future of MySQL? This is a question that interests many.

To be specific: Will there be significant performance improvements? Code contributions? Bug fixes? New features? Open Source licensed documentation? Will the users be happy with the Monthly Rapid Updates now released for the MySQL Community Server?

On another, more competitive level: Will there be successful forks? What will the MySQL AB founders do? What is Percona’s next move?

Julian Cash, known for his visionary photography, extended his scope during a Wednesday session at the MySQL Conference. Hard work during his predictive session gave me insight. I now know the answers.

However, I’m afraid I cannot share the revelations on this blog. What I can do, though, is to point to Julian Cash’s site “The Human Creativity Project”, and to the visible results of his other sessions on Wednesday.

Thank you Julian!

Links:

• The Human Creativity Project: http://www.humancreativity.com/
• Julian Cash’s visionary sessions on Wednesday at the MySQL Conference: http://www.flickr.com/photos/juliancash/sets/72157617184626249

Today’s Great Open Cloud Shootout was great fun — at least for me! I had the pleasure to tease these distinguished gentlemen with cloudy questions:

• Lew Tucker, Cloud CTO, Sun Microsystems
• Monty Taylor, MySQL Drizzle Geek, Sun Microsystems
• Jeremy Zawodny, MySQL hacker, craigslist
• Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda
• Thorsten von Eicken, CTO, RightScale
• Prashant Malik, Cassandra Dude, Facebook
• Mike Culver, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

Jetlagged from transatlantic travel, I woke up in the middle of the Californian night thinking about what has changed since I arrived at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara on Sunday evening. I was pondering all the questions MySQL users and Sun colleagues were asking at the event, and what the user base was thinking out loud on Twitter yesterday.

What has changed is obviously that Sun Microsystems and Oracle announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun.

What further changes we will see as a result of that is a different story. Evidently, I don’t sit in with a crystal ball predicting what will happen next. Nor do I have insight into Oracle’s plans for MySQL, once the deal is closed. Nor am I even in a position to comment upon the acquisition, so I won’t do it.

However, what I do know and what I can say is what has not changed with MySQL:

1. There still is a huge base of MySQL users out there. They have economic interests that are independent of whoever owns MySQL. The users in the MySQL community come in all flavors, ranging from casual users to those who intimately know the inner workings of MySQL and have contributed to the code base.
2. There still is a huge talent pool of MySQL experts in Sun Microsystems, in Support, in Consulting, in Training, in Engineering, in other parts of Sun. They have a strong loyalty towards the MySQL users they have served over many years.
3. MySQL is still licensed under the GPL. The GPL license used to form a safety net for the users not certain about whether MySQL AB would follow the spirit of Open Source. It continued to be so with Sun Microsystems. And the Open Source license continues to provide a safety net for its user base, regardless of the owner of MySQL.
4. MySQL has founders, one in particular, who still haven’t fallen off the face of the planet. Moreover, their passion for MySQL and its users continues.
5. Sun Microsystems still is a separate legal entity, practising what’s known as “business as usual“. This is familiar to MySQLers from the time between Sun’s acquisition of MySQL was announced mid-January 2008 to the closing at the end of February 2008. During the period between announcement and closing, we continue to behave as separate entities, even competing with each other.
6. Part of Business as Usual is a number of product announcements at the MySQL Conference this week. I’m looking forward to these!

While I cannot and will not personally speculate about what happens next, nor about Oracle’s intentions with MySQL, I think our users are looking to what the names most inimately associated with MySQL are saying — even if they no longer work for Sun Microsystems:

• First, Mårten Mickos, MySQL AB’s former CEO and long-time SVP at Sun, has several positive comments in his Forbes interview “Why Oracle Won’t Kill MySQL”.
• Second, Michael “Monty” Widenius, MySQL AB’s co-founder, also finds many positive things to say in his blog statement “To be (free) or not to be (free)“.

My humble suggestions: Keep using MySQL! Follow the announcements from the MySQL Conference this week! Keep helping each other within the MySQL community!

Go MySQL!

The last open keynote slot in the MySQL Conference, Thursday 10:00am, is now filled with the keynoter we had in mind all the time: Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.

Andy’s bio is one of the longest and most impressive of MySQL Conference keynoters ever:

• Sun co-founder, employee number one
• invented the “Stanford University Network workstation” that eventually became the Sun-1 Workstation
• was instrumental in launching other successful Sun products, including the SparcStation 1
• now works with Sun’s Systems Group to help drive next generation X64 and storage servers product architecture as well as HPC opportunities
• left Sun in 1994 and rejoined 2005 through Sun acquiring his company Kealia
• was one of the first investors in Google

What will Andy talk about? “The Solid State Storage Revolution” is the title. For more details, come to the conference!

But before that, I’d encourage you to take a closer look at his bio

• Sun Executive Bio / Andy Bechtolsheim: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/ceo/bio.jsp?name=Andy%20Bechtolsheim
• Wikipedia in English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Bechtolsheim
• Wikipedia in German: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_von_Bechtolsheim

The last couple of years, I have had the pleasure of moderating panels at the MySQL Conference. Last year, it was about scaling MySQL, and the year before that, it was the Clash of the DB Egos.

For this year, the original plan was for a MySQL Roadmap Shootout. Many of these questions Karen Tegan Padir should address in her opening keynote, and Robin Schumacher and Rob Young will dig deeper in “The Future of MySQL“.

Hence, we decided to aim higher: We’re going for the clouds. This year’s new topic is “The Great Open Cloud Shootout“.

We’re starting from the simple question: What really is a Cloud? We go on to ask other questions: How do databases fit in the cloud? What are the technical benefits of and limitations to the cloud? What happened to SaaS — is it dead? And we conclude by passing on the questions the audience twitters.

Our list of panelist celebrities includes Lew Tucker (Sun’s Cloud CTO), Monty Taylor (full-time MySQL Drizzle hacker), Jeremy Zawodny (craigslist) and Chander Kant (Zmanda), and we might add another industry luminary or two to this list.

Link:

• The Great Open Cloud Shootout http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/8871

Tomorrow, The Big Trek starts. Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana will spend the time from then on until the MySQL Conference and Expo starts travelling by rail and bus all the way from home in Montreal to California. Hence the name “Dups on Rails”. The purpose of the Big Trek is to talk about MySQL in Canadian and US universities. He’ll also arrange MySQL Meetups and go on customer visits, as people ping him.

Towards the end of the trip, as we get closer to the User Conference, Dups won’t be alone. His alter ego Colin Charles (yes, people do mix up Dups and Colin) will join him from 13 April onwards in Northern California. And at the same time, a parallel trek is started by Giuseppe Maxia an Sheeri K. Cabral, in Southern California.

The list of universities include Queens University, University of Western Ontario, Illinois Institute of Technology, Purdue University, University of San Francisco, Cal Poly, UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, Stanford University and others. 

The most frequent topic Dups will speak about is “What the MySQL is this anyway?“. However, I can assure you that his attempt is not to turn our product into a swear word.

The exact venues and times are documented in detail on http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Campus_Tour_2009 in Forge Wiki.

And, if you want a picture of Dups on Rails, do take a look at Dups’s own blog entry on the subject. 

BTW, I just joined Dups’s Campus Tour Facebook group and encourage those interested in meeting Dups to do the same!

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/

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is getting closer by the minute! So it’s time for Position 3 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

3. Corrado Pandiani (Football Club Internazionale Milano Spa, Milan, Italy): Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler for online logging & real-time stats. See Corrado’s DevZone article, and his blog.

Thanks and congratulations, Corrado! I 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/pandiani-use-case.html
• http://blog.pandiani.com/category/mysqlen/

“Reminders work. At least on me.” I confessed in my previous CfP posting.

Well, guess what also works on me? Deadline extensions! I aim at making most (ehh, all) deadlines, but at times, I fail. And I have observed similar behaviour in others.

And therefore we have extended our CfP to 5 November 2008 (all fellow Europeans out there: “midnight 11/05/2008 PST” looks like mid May, but isn’t).

Some key points:

1. We’re looking at high quality presentations
2. We’re looking at innovation, i.e. *new* things
3. We’re looking at covering main areas of MySQL usage

Obviously, we want all three of the above. And despite the fact that we have 284 applications (a hundred more than at the same time last year), we still see some holes when it comes to some main areas of MySQL usage. So if you have recently innovated with MySQL in the Java area, or Windows, or combining MySQL with other Sun software such as GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenSolaris or OpenOffice, you may have a good chance at hitting a sweet spot.

Go propose!

Yesterday, we concluded our third annual “MySQL Kundenkonferenz” in Munich. We had a record number [1] of participants, 255 on the re-count including hosts. I had the pleasure to deliver the welcome speech and to moderate the event. Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed the day and it was my distinct impression that the expectations of the participants were more than met.

The external setting of the conference was Hilton Munich City on Rosenheimerstraße, close to Munich’s culture centre Gasteig — and just one S-Bahn stop away from home for me. Excellent facilities.

The start was delayed slightly due to our high-latency registration process, which prompts us to go for something more scalable next year. At 9:30 I could then start about “Powering the Web Economy“, describing the changes since last year (such as MySQL having been acquired by Sun), and presenting a record number of hosts: Antje Oehring, Bertrand Matthelié, Braddley Wilkinson, Brendan Towers, Donatus Schmid, Franz Haberhauer, Gerhard Jährling, Hana Hütter, Harry Timm, Jan Kneschke, Jürgen Giesel, Kai Voigt, myself Kaj Arnö, Klaus Bergius, Ralf Gebhardt, Richard Mason, Robin Schumacher, and Rolf Günther.

As part of the intro, I asked for the number of bloggers in the audience and got perhaps around 10 hands. I asked for any blogging to happen with the tag mysqlconfde08. Interestingly, when searching for mysqlconfde08 this morning, I found no blogs yet, but instead, four Twitter comments on Twemes. One of them, stiefkind, acknowledges that I am “nordic by nature” but claims that I “speak German with a Swiss accent”. I take that as a compliment [2]!

After me, Robin Schumacher (Director of Product Marketing for MySQL) shared his insights into “The Future of MySQL: What You Need to Know about What’s Coming“. No, he is of no relation to Michael Schumacher, but at least he talks very fast, he confessed.

Before the lunch break, we had two parallel tracks of two technical sessions, by four very knowledgeable presenters: Ralf Gebhardt (MySQL Sales Engineer) on Web 2.0 and memcached, Jan Kneschke (of lighttpd and MySQL Proxy fame) on High Availability and Load Balancing, Franz Haberhauer (Chief Technologist) on MySQL Best Practices on Solaris, and Kai Voigt (MySQL Trainer) on selecting the right High Availability solution for MySQL.

After a short but quite delicious lunch, our Silver Sponsors (Continuent, Dolphin and Talend) each got a well-deserved sixty-second commercial break, describing their solutions. And then Sun Germany’s press speaker and marketing director Donatus Schmid presented the Sun-side view of the status of the Sun-MySQL integration after over half a year since the acquisition. His brief but eloquent speech and his respectful attitude illustrated very well why MySQLers find themselves in good hands as part of Sun.

Then we got our surprise treatment from the star guest of the day, Miriam Tuerk, CEO of Infobright. A Canadian of German descent, she presented herself in fluent German. Her accent wasn’t foreign, but that of Mannheim (a city not far from Frankfurt) [3], which earned her spontaneous applause and the audience’s full attention to why Infobright’s data warehousing solutions (Infobright Community Edition) are the way to go when you’ve got more than 500 GB of data. Personally, I am very impressed both with the Infobright product (giving fast replies to aggregate SELECT queries, based on clever metadata and no need for the DBA to do indexing), and with Miriam as a person. It’s not everyday that I see companies that are this willing to learn, to understand, to release their core product under GPLv2, and to spend energy and resources building a community.

The afternoon had two tracks, one with MySQL customers presenting Use Cases, and another technical track with the already mentioned Jan Kneschke (on Performance Tuning) and Kai Voigt (on Backup Strategies). The customer cases were enlightening, as they usually are when the presenters are good. Uwe Geercken, IT Manager of Swissport, described the situation before picking MySQL, how MySQL was chosen, what the experiences were, and what the current issues are, in the interesting business of running airports. Jörg Künzel from OBI’s IT partner GfD described the innovative use of MySQL in OBI, the leading European Do-It-Yourself store with a size larger than that of Sun Microsystems. Their use of MySQL is distributed, so that each cash register has a separate MySQL Server, enabling offline usage either when networks are down (important when opening chains in new economies with flaky networks, and when selling Christmas trees outdoors without any cabling whatsoever).

During the whole day, the presentations were interpreted into sign language (like above during the OBI presentation). One of the Austrian MySQL customers present was hearing impaired, and I was intrigued to learn that the Austrian version of Gebärdensprache is mutually not intelligible with the German one. Although sometimes challenging, that’s not the case with spoken language (Germans and Austrians understand each other as easily as Brits and Americans, or Swedes from Sweden and Finland Swedes like myself).

The last presentation was an educational roller-coaster tour (that was the initial slide that the presenter Ralf Gebhardt chose himself) on scaling and virtualisation. After that, we had the usual question-and-answer session, with plenty of questions directed at all the presenters. For most roadmap oriented questions, we saw a pattern of

1. a question from the audience, in German, followed by
2. a semi-answer from myself, also translating the question into English, so that
3. Robin Schumacher could give the right answer.

After the Q&A, we had a networking session over drinks, which then continued for some of us at the Schrannenhalle, where we were joined by Florian Haas and Patrick Rion from Linbit (who were in town for the Systems Fair). We concluded the day with great food at the French restaurant Cameleon [4].

All in all, a fun and educational day with lots of networking. Thanks to all presenters, and especially to Jürgen Giesel (who was in charge of the arrangements of the day) and Bertrand Matthelié (who is in charge of all European MySQL Customer Conferences) for excellent organisation.

[1] Had we had one more participant, then we could no longer store no_of_attendees in a one-byte TINYINT UNSIGNED.

[2] Once many years ago in Poland, I was trying to read out loud a sentence in Polish. I don’t know much beyond “Dziękuję” (thanks) and “Smacznego” (bon appetite), except what I can extrapolate from the 200 or so words of Russian that I know (but I don’t speak Russian, I just pretend). Then, I got the best foreign language compliment I had ever got: “Your Polish has a strong Russian accent“.

[3] I thanked Miriam and named her “die Tochter Mannheims” (the daughter of Mannheim), referring to Söhne Mannheims (Sons of Mannheim), a German musical band founded 1995 in Mannheim by Xavier Naidoo and others.

[4] Bertrand dislikes non-European food. I learned that quickly after starting to work with him almost exactly eight years ago. Ah, time flies.

Links:

• MySQL Kundenkonferenz: http://www.mysql.de/news-and-events/european-conferences/2008/
• Robin Schumacher’s Blog: http://blogs.mysql.com/robin/
• Jan Kneschke’s Blog: http://jan.kneschke.de/
• Twemes (twitter memes — global tags for twitter): http://twemes.com/mysqlconfde08
• Wie, wo, was weiß OBI (fun 40 second TV AD): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC8WKrTnIVk