Lately, it has been popular on blogs and elsewhere to portray the relationship between open source and closed source as a non-fight.

• In The Beautiful Game, Bryan Kirschner (who leads research strategy for the Open Source Software Lab of Microsoft) blogs about the MySQL User’s Conference and shares his thinking about why Microsoft and MySQL are working together on a number of applications, including ADO.NET provider Interop, and a Visual Studio plug-in that enables developers to access MySQL data directly from VS.
• In The “it’s not us versus them” meme, Matt Asay (influential Open Source thinker and blogger) describes how Microsoft increasingly point out that “it’s not open source versus proprietary” meme. He argues that it would normally be the new player, not the incumbent player, who one should expect to use this type of argument.

Whatever the reason for anybody to claim it’s not us versus them, I think the winner is the end user — as long as the claim is backed up by actions.

For MySQL, let me say that we’ve humbly done our best to take actions. We’ve worked with Microsoft operating systems and applications since last century. Not long after the release of MySQL (originally under Solaris, then under Linux), the software was released under the Windows operating system. Furthermore, we released an ODBC driver coded in-house; as for connectors to many popular Open Source languages, they’ve been developed by the community, not by MySQL itself. And fast forwarding to this century, we beat Microsoft SQL Server by releasing an ADO.Net driver for MySQL Server quicker than MSFT themselves for MSSQL. This is for the good of the end user, who gets more choice and more opportunities inside the Microsoft ecosystem.

With Microsoft (through Port 25) being a sponsor at the MySQL Conference & Expo, and having met Bryan Kirschner and Jamie M. Cannon (both of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft), I am happy to see that Microsoft is starting to acknowledge MySQL’s importance for the Microsoft ecosystem. “As commercial software companies, MySQL and Microsoft share substantial common ground.”, Bryan says in his blog. There seems to be something positive to what MySQL can do for Microsoft customers, also from the perspective of Microsoft itself.

When it comes to Microsoft and MySQL working together, I think there is more in store for the end user. With official contacts established between the two companies, new ideas are getting floated. Some of them may fly. Expect to hear more later!

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!

The early registration of the MySQL Conference & Expo 23-26 April 2007 closes today, 14 March 2007. So if you want to cut your attendance costs by 200 US dollars, register now!

Quoting the About The MySQL Conference & Expo page:

The MySQL Conference & Expo will feature:

• Over 100 sessions for a wide range of skill levels
• Tutorials to help develop technical skills and learn new tricks
• More than 2000 MySQL developers, gurus, experts, and users under one roof
• Dozens of new tools and technologies from third party vendors in the Expo Hall
• Birds of a Feather sessions, evening events, and networking opportunities.

That listing obviously misses the most important point:

• The Clash of the DB Egos, a provoked fight between some of the most opinionated two-initials DB gurus the world has seen

I’d love to see you there!

Would you like to experience a battle between E. F. Codd, C. J. Date, U. M. Widenius, J. A. Starkey and U. M. Ronström? Some of the biggest egos the database world has seen!

Well, I cannot promise you all of the above, especially when it comes to Codd, the father of relational databases (1923-2003). Codd’s colleague Date might also be a no-show, but I think I can promise you Widenius (MySQL, MyISAM), Starkey (Datatrieve, Interbase, BLOBs, MVCC, Falcon) and Ronström (NDB Cluster). During the Wednesday keynote at the MySQL Conference & Expo 23-26 April 2007 in Santa Clara, I will be provoking a fight about what constitutes a database, what’s the right way of doing locking, whether it ever was smart to store BLOBs in a database to begin with, and who ever needs versioning.

Given how I know said egos, I don’t expect it to be hard to throw in a couple of sentences that will fire off a slight disagreement between the gentlemen. And during the course of the discussion, I plan to bring in a few more egos, from Solid and Nitro.

Let the battle begin!