My fellow countryman and Sun colleague Henrik Ingo is collecting “a Monument to Monty” on his blog:

I will be meeting Monty on this Friday (March 20th), in fact we will celebrate the start of his new company Monty Program Ab. (For the avoidance of doubt: No, I’m not joining it, I just happen to live nearby.)

I decided Monty leaving “MySQL Ab” at least deserves to be considered some kind of a milestone. After all, MySQL is the database that propelled the web to what it is today. When you think back 10+ years, there must be many memorable moments you have experienced with MySQL.

This is what I want to do: This page will be dedicated to Monty - consider it a monument to the father of MySQL. Please use the comment form below and write something nice, personal and MySQL related. How did you first start using MySQL? Or what was your most weird and exciting experience with MySQL? What do you do with MySQL? Do you earn a living using it? Maybe you are one of those people who can write a poem in SQL?

Sadly, I can’t be part of the farewell dinner / celebration of his new company. But I wrote my personal little thank you note on the page (pasted below). Perhaps you would like to, too?

If so, then click here: http://openlife.cc/montysmonument

Vendor lock-in

Monty,

How did I start using MySQL? I may be a special case in that I have followed your coding since the 1970s, but I think I share my reasoning to start using MySQL with a lot of people: Lack of vendor lock-in.

At my company Polycon in Finland, we were coding applications and using other databases. I think our default was Interbase, as we were coding in Delphi. We were also using Postgres for some Web apps.

Knowing your undisputable coding skills was not reason enough for me in 1997 to decide to swap our Java apps to MySQL. “The customers” may demand something else, or the functionality might be insufficient. Who knows.

You convinced me that whatever we at Polycon invested in MySQL, it wouldn’t be a dead end. It would be easy to migrate away, if we later on decided to do so. We wouldn’t need to make any moves that would lock us into being MySQL users.

In our case, the story ended up being the same as for many (if not most) users who start with MySQL: We never found a sufficient reason to move away.

In short: You made it easy so to move off MySQL, that you purged all barriers to *start* using MySQL. And that philosophy created the trust which was a necessary component (among many others) in building a user base of millions.

Thanks for inventing the Deviously Unlocked Vendor Lock-In!

Kaj

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!

Here is my personal recipe for celebrating MySQL 5.1 GA (called “Five shot one“):

Ingredients:

• Kalashnikov vodka from Izhevsk, Udmurtia (Спасибо, Bar!)
• “PINGVIN” salted liquorice (tack, mamma!) — the salmiak for the dot
• Erdinger Weißbier (danke, Kirsten!)

Served in:

• Five Iittala shot glasses from Finland
• One HB 0,5 litre Weißbier glass from Hofbräuhaus, Munich

Thank you, MySQL Engineering Team!

At the end of the Orlando meeting in January this year when the Sun acquisition was announced, I remember sitting next to MySQL’s co-founder David Axmark in the bus going to some evening event. “What do you want to do now, with so many opportunities opening up?” was my question to him, partly as his friend, partly as his colleague and partly as his line manager. David seemed very confident in the future of MySQL within Sun, but less sure about his own future role.

With that as a background, and knowing David since well over 20 years, I was not all that surprised to read his resignation letter, and in particular his reasoning for resigning:

I have thought about my role at Sun and decided that I am better off in smaller organisations. I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them. It would be far better for me to “retire” from employment and work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis.

Let me recap what David has done for MySQL. David is the reason MySQL is FOSS. Without David, MySQL wouldn’t be GPL (Monty originally planned a closed-source product). David is also the reason people associate MySQL primarily with Sweden and less so with Finland, since MySQL AB was founded in Uppsala to be close to David (and our third co-founder Allan Larsson).

(The above scene from Stockholm harbour shows the boats of database entrepreneurs David Axmark and Larry Ellison; after the acquisition of MySQL by Sun, David may afford an upgrade, even after his donation to the Software Freedom Law Center).

I wish David would have stayed longer at Sun, but I understand why he decided to resign and I respect his decision. I’m happy he’s fine with working as a consultant for Sun, doing speaking engagements and connecting us with his huge network. It’s very much appreciated.

We share so many fond memories together, starting from our first meeting sometimes in the 1980s at Monty’s place in Gamla Skomakarböle, in the outskirts of Helsinki. And then there was the memorable trip to MySQL’s first CeBIT appearance in 2001, just after I had agreed with Mårten and Monty to join MySQL. And hiking in Larry Stefonic’s bivvy sacks on a mountain in Washington. And countless other stories.

I’ve learnt so much from David, particularly as he’s been my predecessor, role model and esteemed colleague in plenty of respects over the time at MySQL AB. He has lead Engineering, before we started to recruit people with the title of “VP Engineering”. He’s lead Internal IT. He’s lead the Community efforts. He’s worked with the FSF. He’s managed and moderated his somewhat more, ehmm, hot-tempered co-founder Monty. He’s travelled the world, with a particular fondness for Asia. And he’s taken oodles of digital pictures. Not that I’ve followed David in all aspects, but it does seem I’ve copied him in the above respects, with sometimes a shorter, sometimes longer latency.

You won’t be surprised that I feel a deep gratitude for what David has done. In particular, I want to thank him for introducing me to all the wonderful people in the FOSS community. And I’m sure all Sun Dolphins will join me in the most important thank-you note:

Thanks David for having and pursuing the vision that made you found MySQL!

Lest we become overly sentimental, let me say that I am confident David will continue in his role as an overall FOSS ambassador. Nearly a quarter century working on FOSS as a pioneer gives David insights that few of us have, that Sun is happy to continue learning from, and that I’m sure David is happy to share with budding Open Source companies.