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!

As Colin revealed last week, Google has accepted MySQL for the Google Summer of Code 2009.

We’ve already participated in GSoC 2007 and 2008, so this is our third year running. We know more than before about what’s waiting for us, and so does our mentors and perhaps even some of our students. And in particular, Colin Charles has been our GSoC program coordinator all of these years, so he is quite seasoned by now.

The basic idea for MySQL to participate in Google Summer of Code is to provide students with an opportunity to contribute to MySQL, in return for some attention by our mentors. Or highly qualified and committed mentors of others who develop software tightly coupled with MySQL, for that matter. Well-known community members such as Marc Delisle, Sheeri Kritzer Cabral and Paul McCullagh have been MySQL GSoC mentors and we’re hoping to be able to accept more non-Sun mentors this year. 

We’re now in the phase where mentors and students from inside and outside Sun Microsystems can enter their MySQL related project suggestions to our Google Summer of Code MySQL ideas page.

However, if you’re a potential mentor, you’re in a hurry. The student application opens still today! So while we’re still accepting mentor ideas, beware that the student application deadline is Friday next week (3 April 2009). Not much time for juggling ideas, entering them into the GSoC framework, and preliminiarily discussing with students.

The matching of mentors and students then goes on for a good week, until 15 April 2009. Decisions are announced 20 April 2009.

The coding itself begins 23 May 2009, or more precisely, that’s when Google begins issuing initial payments for students who are “in good standing”.

Mid-term evaluation is 13 July 2009, and work has to be done by 17 August 2009. Final evaluations happen, and final results are announced 25 August 2009.

If you’re a student, here’s what to do:

1. Identify an interesting project in the MySQL GSoC Forge Wiki page http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/SummerOfCode2009Ideas
2. If you have a great idea that you think Sun (or somebody else) is willing to sponsor, suggest it on that Wiki page
3. Look at the Google SoC FAQ page at http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/program/google/gsoc2009/faqs

If in doubt, email Colin at MySQL.com. But do read his blog entry first!

Looking forwards to an interesting (Northern Hemisphere) Summer of Code 2009!

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting with Per-Ola Sjöswärd, executive IT strategist at the Swedish National Police. That organisation is already way ahead of most of us when it comes to Open Source adoption. But they have higher ambitions still.

The Rikspolisstyrelsen logotype is on many Sun slides, as an example of an “Enterprise 2.0″ type MySQL customer. Besides sounding cool, the ”Enterprise 2.0″ name is supposed to portray what all the organisations in that group have in common: They’re generic enterprises in any industry, and they use the same internal IT architecture as Web 2.0 companies use externally.

The Swedish Police, to be specific, doesn’t use just Web apps internally. But still, we’re talking about a 70% share. The other 30% are based on the Java Swing architecture, so it’s still fairly portable and far away from vendor lock in.

The figure 70% also goes for the share of their IT budget that is allocated towards internal application development. Only 30% of their apps are in areas such as HR or ERP, where generic solutions can be applied. All applications specific to the “industry” of being the police authority have to be tailored to the needs of the Swedish Police, as no generic apps in this area exist.

That, in turn, means that the main headache of their IT and CIO should be the future compliance and maintenance of their own code base. By contrast, the main headache should not be about vendor lock-in or the cost of proprietary licenses. And that is exactly where the Swedish Police is heading: Lack of vendor dependence, very low licensing costs and total cost of ownership through Open Source.

In the CIO corner of mysql.com we have described how Per-Ola took the initiative that led to the Swedish Police having adopted a multi-tiered architecture built on Java Enterprise Edition and Open Source components. That architecture they call LIMBO, for Linux, MySQL and JBoss. Now, they’re taking the next step — migrating their old apps, based on Tuxedo, to LIMBO. This iniative they call “Ren IT”, meaning “Clean IT” — as they’re cleaning up their legacy application architecture.

That’s no small undertaking. We’re talking 33 applications, with a total rewrite effort of 107.000 man hours.

That rewrite effort requires a budget of 9,1 million Euros, which is money that has to be taken from somewhere as it isn’t part of any default budgets. On the other hand, that still represents a huge savings compared to the 21 million Euros they would have to spend just on licenses, proprietary server hardware and maintenance alone (no new functionality!) to hold on to their current Tuxedo solutions, which also includes proprietary operating systems, server hardware and databases.

The Swedish Police is making bold moves, but doing absolutely the right thing with taxpayer money. The savings of over 10 million euros translates to quite a lot of police cars, or full-time police officers concentrating on what the Swedish National Police is in business for.

What a great role model!

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 is undergoing some organisational changes as part of Sun. Mårten Mickos (MySQL AB’s CEO 2001-2008 and SVP at Sun 2008-) is moving on in his life, outside Sun. This is independent of Michael “Monty” Widenius’ recent departure.

I’ve worked for Mårten ever since joining MySQL in 2001, in various capacities (VP Training, VP Consulting, VP Services, VP Engineering, CIO, and since 2005 VP Community Relations). I will obviously miss working with him. At the same time, I can understand and respect his decision to move on to something else, and wish him all the best, whatever his upcoming pursuits will be.

I owe Mårten much of what I’ve achieved in business during this century. I’ve known him since 1981, and counted him as a close friend ever since. Even if the era of working for the same company has come to an end, I look forward to spending some non-business-oriented time with him.

While parting ways can be very painful, I am certain that MySQL’s culture and business philosophy will live on in Sun, thanks largely to Mårten’s contribution. In fact, you could say MySQL now becomes mainstream at Sun. Former MySQLers continue in key positions, in some cases with a mandate to generalise and apply MySQL related learnings on other Open Source products. In fact, the newly formed organisation that MySQL now is part of includes GlassFish, Open SSO and Open ESB, thus making us part of the industry’s by far largest open source based group. It is a natural evolution in becoming a regular product at Sun — as opposed to being treated separate and different as we have for the past year. That time has been important for us to be “grafted” into Sun, but now it is time to move forward.

As anytime when the person at the top changes, other changes will certainly follow. The key point to remember here is that MySQL, the product, remains alive and well. Sun is completely committed to building a big open source based business and very much supportive of the various communities it is engaged in. In another blog, I will expand upon what this means for the future.

Do you remember Guy Adams? He was one of the winners of the “5.1 Use Case Competition”, ending up on position #2. Guess what: He has a webinar coming up tomorrow, by the title Deploying MySQL in a High Performance Satellite Network Management Environment by Parallel.
 
Guy works with Parallel Ltd. in Milton Keynes in the UK. You may also want to read up on Guy’s DevZone article. This is what you can expect of the webinar:

Join us for this informative technical webinar with Guy Adams, CTO at Parallel, whose flagship product SatManage is the worldwide leader in visualization and automation software that integrates NOC applications for satellite and hybrid networks. In this seminar Guy will talk about their migration from Oracle to MySQL, and the performance boost they gained from it. He will also talk about their application caching layer which provides a different but complementary philosophy to memcached, aiming to overcome of the issues with memcached in a data warehousing type application with CGI performance.

Timing: Tuesday, 3 February 2009, 10:00 am PST, 1:00 pm EST, 18:00 GMT.

The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long followed by Q&A.

Links:

• http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-285.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/partitioning_manage_satellite.html

Like a number of other Sun people, whether MySQLers or not, I will travel to Brussels next weekend, for FOSDEM ‘09, an acronym which stands for the Free and Open Source Software Developer’s European Meeting.  

If you think you’re late in registering, or if you don’t have a budget, don’t worry. Entrance is free, and registration isn’t necessary. “Just come to the campus and enjoy the conference”, the FOSDEM site stresses.

As for MySQL, we have a developers room on Sunday as follows:

I’m looking forward to taking a user perspective on social networks in my presentation at 13:15.

Do also take a look at our MySQL Forge Wiki page on FOSDEM 2009. We use it to broadcast any last minute information.

I hope to meet you in Brussels!

Lenz Grimmer and Duleepa Wijayawardhana have made a series of interviews with the everyday heroes of MySQL. Some are oldtimers, others are new. Some previously worked for MySQL AB, others joined our team through Sun. But all are part of the fabric of today’s MySQL.

Lenz and Dups asked a number of interesting questions from these guys:

• Lars Heill, Release Engineering Manager
• Masood Mortazavi, MySQL Engineering Manager
• Stewart Smith, Drizzle/MySQL Cluster
• Alexander “Salle” Keremidarski, MySQL EMEA Support Lead
• Adam Donnison, web developer at MySQL.com
• Ignacio “Iggy” Galarza, Jr., developer at the MySQL Connectors team

• What are the key principles of open development?
• Whose philosophy is “My job is not to get excited. My job is to worry about our customers.”
• What are the “hidden ingredients” to make MySQL.com scale?
• What are the challenges for the Release engineering team preparing for the post-5.1 GA world?
• What will enable the Drizzle team to show the user how much memory each query consumed at various points of execution?
• Who has run MySQL 5.1 in production for 18 months?
• Why is the Win32 API a challenge?
• Who is a generalist with a preference for the Windows platform?
• Who has a perspective on the MySQL Support Team dating all the way back to 2002?
• Who is looking forward to the MySQL Cluster 6.4 release?
• What is the SunInventory web service?
• Who was born in Northern Norway? Who has family in Iran, Turkey and Germany?
• Whose Ph.D. dissertation was titled “Vortex-Vortex Interactions and Probability Density Function Methods”? Who has written COBOL for a living?
• Who thinks “Photography feeds my soul”?
• What is the meaning of the acronym “WTF”?
• Whose office is “a semi-grown-up nerd’s playroom”?
• Who worked as root@local.internet.provider and didn’t find Oracle for Linux and hence started with MySQL 3.22?
• Who works daily on C, C++, Pascal, JavaScript, CMake, WiX, Lua, Perl on Windows, Linux and Mac?
• Who isn’t even 30 years old yet, but claims to look older?
• Who wants to make MySQL development processes contributor friendly?
• Whose beard froze in the -25 to -30 degree winters in China’s northeastern provinceof Heilongjiang?
• Who works in Menlo Park? Trondheim? Melbourne? Orlando? Sofia? Rural Victoria?
• Will the next Bourne film be called “Database supremacy”?

For the answers (or hints at answers) to these and other questions, go read the interviews!

• Lars Heill, Release Engineering Manager: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/lars_heill.html
• Masood Mortazavi, MySQL Engineering Manager: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/masood_mortazavi.html
• Stewart Smith, Drizzle/MySQL Cluster: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/stewart-smith.html
• Alexander “Salle” Keremidarski, MySQL EMEA Support Lead: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/salle.html
• Adam Donnison, web developer at MySQL.com: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/adam_donnison.html
• Ignacio “Iggy” Galarza, Jr., developer at the MySQL Connectors team: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/ignacio_galarza.html

Thank you, Lars, Masood, Stewart, Salle, Adam and Iggy — both for your daily heroics, and for telling us about it!

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/