This year, we got fourteen Google Summer of Code projects accepted. Colin Charles has informed the students, and things can now get started!

The first step is what’s called the Community Bonding Period. That’s happening right now, and also being facilitated by Colin. Colin has written a summary of the Community Bonding period on the Forge Wiki, and there’s also a general description by Google.

We expect great things from the students. We want them to produce code that our userbase can use as features in MySQL.

Given our high expectations for what the students produce, we don’t expect all fourteen projects to succeed. And we do want our students to be an integral part of the MySQL community even after they’re done with the Summer of Code 2008.

I’d also like to add that we’re grateful for the mentoring participation from the MySQL community, where PBXT and phpMyAdmin are worthy of mentioning.

Looking forward to the code produced, and to Colin’s upcoming blogs on SoC progress reports!

References:

• http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mysql/about.html
• http://googlesummerofcode.blogspot.com/2007/04/so-what-is-this-community-bonding-all.html
• http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/SummerOfCode
• http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Community_Bonding

Today, 24 March 2008, the student application period opens. And it remains open for a week, until 31 March 2008, presumably at one minute before midnight UTC.

If you haven’t already discussed the MySQL related ideas published on forge.mysql.com/wiki/SummerOfCode2008Ideas, do so now.

A good place to first silently lurk in and then actively participate in is lists.mysql.com/soc.

As opposed to last year, you can now also apply for MySQL Worklog Items Open for Community Development listed on forge.mysql.com/wiki/ComContribution_Worklog. Worklog items are internal “todo items” or coding tasks identified (but not yet necessarily being actively worked upon) by MySQL AB, ehh, now Sun Microsystems.

With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
• Tools: GUI, MySQL Workbench, MySQL Proxy
• Events: MySQL Users Conferences
• Licensing: GPL
• Architecture of Participation, Summer of Code, Virtual company
• Other: Release Policy, Documentation, Use cases

I hope this will make my blog more (re)usable.

(The picture is from this summer, when navigating the way up the Großvenediger, a 3662 m high mountain in the Hohe Tauern region of Austria.)

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!

Having taken a look at the 35 MySQL Summer of Code applications, I can now say that we have several very strong applications, such as:

• IPv6: Enabling MySQL to connect over IPv6 internet
• MySQL Based Atom Store (storing Google GDATA in MySQL)
• Test case development / Load testing
• Test suite development
• MySQL Auditing Software
• The “anti-profiler” - a performance analysis tool for database engines

For several of the above, we have multiple good applications. The applicants come from recognised universities across the world, not just the US and Europe. Some have extensive experience from professional software development. Sadly, we will end up having to reject several good proposals.

In addition to the challenging task of picking the best applications, we also have to prepare them for Google’s final approval. We expect to get it done by Friday, and Google to have approved (a subset of) our recommendations by the end of next week.

Today, the time closed to apply for student positions at MySQL Summer of Code. We are very fortunate and thankful to have got 35 applicants fulfilling the formal requirements of an application fully entered and coupled with a task announced on http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/SummerOfCode — thank you!

Our next task is to narrow this group down to the number of projects which can actually start. This will be a much smaller number. Even in the theoretical case that Google would allow us to have 35 projects (and they won’t), we don’t have the internal mentoring resources to guide that many Summer of Code projects.

Colin Charles has already been quite busy replying to the incoming flood of applications, insisting on them being more specific than “I’m in, just give me any task!”. Still, some applications are a bit too general for us to be able to pick them. For the others, we will group them into projects that

1. affect the MySQL Server code base
2. affect the code base of a MySQL Connector
3. affect the code base of a MySQL GUI tool
4. expand or improve the test suites of MySQL Server
5. introduce new code bases for MySQL AB itself
6. involve the code bases of entities in MySQL’s ecosystem

where the last category is quite an interesting one, where both Sheeri Kritzer and Paul McCullagh have signed on as mentors and have cool projects described on the Forge Summer of Code page.

Expect us to be done next week, in time for the Google Summer of Code deadline for picking projects. In the meantime, we will be quite busy internally pairing up the tasks with the most suitable mentors.

As I wrote a few days ago in my blog, MySQL is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2007.

The application process for students has now been opened! You have just one good week of time to apply, as the window closes 24 March 2007.

To participate in MySQL Summer of Code,

1. Read my blog announcement on http://www.planetmysql.org/kaj/?p=89
2. Read Google’s Guide to the GSoC Web App for Student Applicants at http://groups.google.com/group/ google-summer-of-code-announce/ web/guide-to-the-gsoc-web-app-for-student-applicants
3. Go to the http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/SummerOfCode page to pick one or several MySQL related projects that interest you
4. Load the http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/SummerOfCode/ApplicationTemplate page for the MySQL related application template, to use as a reference for when you fill in the application itself in the next step
5. Go to the Google Summer of Code Student Signup page at http://code.google.com/soc/student_step1.html and start the signup process itself. Be prepared that it can take a while to fill in.

When filling in the GSoC application, remember that we expect you to follow our Application Template mentioned above. I.e.

• Your application needs to be concise.
• Your application needs to follow our format.
• First you give us your personal details,
• then what you plan on doing,
• then all your actual experience (broken down, for easy reading),
• then what exactly you intend on delivering (the most important part), and
• finally, a simple Yes, I’m willing to sign the MySQL CLA at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Contributor_License_Agreement

If at any point you need assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact MySQL’s Summer of Code Project Administrator Colin Charles (colin@mysql.com).

What happened with the MySQL Winter of Code? It was hit by Global Warming. Specifically, the Community Team got heated up working on the MySQL Conference & Expo 23-26 April 2007, left with little bandwidth to pursue the ideas and action items for Winter of Code.

When winter warms up, it slowly turns into summer. But the coding work remains. Colin Charles was smart enough to combine these two facts with Sheeri Kritzer’s blog entry and hints about the Australian Winter, and took action related to the Google Summer of Code. Colin spoke to Chris DiBona and Leslie Hawthorn of Google and has now signed us up for Google Summer of Code.

In short: We are transitioning the Winter of Code to the Google Summer of Code, and we today sent in our application to Google.

While I am not happy about our not having been able to devote the necessary resources to our WoC, I am happy that the Quality Contribution Program has been launched and had some early successes — like when Martin Friebe submitted a bug report including a test case and a bug fix code patch, which enabled usto verify the bug and apply the fix within two hours of the bug report. Thanks Martin Friebe, Giuseppe Maxia and Chad Miller!

In an attack of misguided pride, we at MySQL AB could choose to feel bad about not having found or fixed that bug ourselves. I don’t. Bugs are a fact of life, and it’s our task to architect our model so that they’re fixed fast. We hate bugs! And we love those who help us kill them!

The Quality Contribution Program has oiled our internal processes for being able to receive, process, review and accept external patches — something which we traditionally haven’t been good at.

In fact, we haven’t been creating as much of an Architecture of Participation at MySQL, as we should expect. What’s an Architecture of Participation? Let me quote the two first sentences from Wikipedia:

The phrase architecture of participation describes the nature of systems that are designed for user contribution, such as open source and Wikipedia. It was coined by Tim O’Reilly, who described it at length in a 2003 speech and later in several of his online writings.

The phrase has come to define one of the key elements of what’s been called Web 2.0, which describes the collection of companies, technologies and projects that are designed around the culture and economics of openness.

Now starts the next step in opening up the MySQL Development Model. The two things that SoC require of us are the same as what an Architecture of Participation requires of any organisation:

(i) identifying mentors
(ii) identifying features to implement

Identifying mentors: Experienced developers need to “Adopt A Programmer” and guide these contributors on the MySQL source code, and how to implement the features they (or we) want them to develop. This takes several hours a week, but if well done, it’s as rewarding for the mentor as it is for the students being guided.

While folks running MySQL University are ideal mentor candidates, I would argue that students at MySQL University also qualify. We absolutely want more than the topmost ten hotshot developers at MySQL as mentors.

Identifying features: In the tentative Winter of Code plans, we proposed large, ambitious tasks

• Improvements to (pure drivers for) Perl, Apache APR, Python, Ruby or new connectors for emerging environments
• New Storage Engines: The Mail Inbox Format Storage Engine, the File System Storage Engine for Windows, for Mac, for Linux, or the Digital Picture (JPG / EXIF) Storage Engine

However, for SoC, we have tasks of all ambition levels — and have not limited ourselves to entirely new features. Jeffrey Pugh, our VP Engineering, and his Dev Leads have provided Colin with a digested list, that Colin is managing at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/SummerOfCode and that currently has the following item headers

• Test Suite Development (Stewart Smith)
  mysql-test-run.pl and mysqltest
• Test case development (Giuseppe Maxia)
  Code coverage improvement
  System Tests - Load Tests and Long-Running Tests
  Test creation tools
• Benchmarking the MySQL Server
• Instance Manager fixes
• Integrate MySQL Cluster with Instance Manager
• INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables for MySQL Cluster status
• MySQL Based Atom Store
• Simple P4 bugs/features involving options/flags on bugs.mysql.com
• Simple features from Worklog, our detailed todo list

At last query, the MySQL bugs system had over 1,499 bugs filed in a Priority 4 state, which means they’re Feature Requests (Severity 4). While all of these are “up for grabs”, we don’t expect our Summer of Code students to pick their favourites from such a long list. Soon, we’ll rank the top ones based on our judgement of how interesting the features are to use, and how easy they are to develop.

So, if you’re interested in participating in our Summer of Code, what should you do?

1. Look for interesting projects in our project list on MySQL Forge.
2. Fill in an application according to our application template, also on MySQL Forge. Do this on the Google Summer of Code web app that will be live from 14 to 24 March 2007.

And if you have questions, feel free to contact Colin Charles and/or myself over email, firstname@mysql.com.