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!

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 coming, and for downloading, it’s already available, as I hope you have noticed from Giuseppe’s blog. We continue our preparations, this time by announcing Position 2 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

2. Guy Adams (Parallel Ltd., Milton Keynes, United Kingdom): Using Partitioning to Manage Satellite Networks. See Guy’s DevZone article.

Thanks and congratulations, Guy! I hope you too 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_manage_satellite.html

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/

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is close, so close that we’re seeding the mirrors (I hope you noted Giuseppe’s blog entry)! So it’s time for Position 4 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

4. Volker Oboda (TeamDrive Systems GmbH, Hamburg, Germany): Using the Pluggable API for TeamDrive. See Volker’s DevZone article, and the Wikipedia article on TeamDrive.

Thanks and congratulations, Volker! Your MySQL Community Contributor T-shirt is underway.

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/teamdrive_pluggable_api.html

With the GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 coming up, we have picked the winners in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

To keep you in suspense, let me first announce those on positions 5 to 10:

5. Fourat Zouari (TriTUX.com, Tunis, Tunisia): Using Partitioning for Data Warehousing. See Fourat’s DevZone article, and his blog entry from May 2008.

6. Ryan Thiessen (Big Fish Games, Seattle, Washington, USA): Logging Game Downloads with Partitioning. See Ryan’s DevZone article.

7. Christopher Lavigne (Breadboard BI, Inc., Pleasanton, California, USA): Using MySQL 5.1 for Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence. See Christopher’s DevZone article.

8. Jianzy Zhaoyang (Alibaba.com, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China): Using the MySQL 5.1 Event Scheduler for an Online Chat System. When Jian’s ongoing migration is done, he has promised a DevZone article.

9. Jakub Vrána (phpMinAdmin, Prague, Czech Republic): Managing Events in phpMinAdmin. See Lenz Grimmer’s blog entry.

10. Santo Leto (HoneySoftware, Trieste, Italy): 5.1 Use Case Reports. See Santo’s blog entries.

Thanks an congratulations, Fourat, Ryan, Christopher, Jian, Jakub and Santo! Your MySQL Community Contributor T-shirts are underway.

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/tritux_partitioning_datawarehousing.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/big_fish_games_partitioning.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/breadboardbi_data_warehouse.html

We’re getting some high quality Use Cases from our user base, related to the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

The first one is by Greg Haase of Lotame, based in Elkridge, Maryland (USA), a company dedicated to providing solutions within social media. His article is about an innovative use of MySQL 5.1 partitioning and Event Scheduler to prune ARCHIVE tables.

There are more articles in the pipeline. And there is still time for you to submit your story by 30 September 2008. We’re all excited to read them, and with your permission, we’ll share them with our user base.

Links:

• Greg Haase’s article Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler to Prune Archive Tables: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/partitioning-event_scheduler.html
• Greg’s blog about Databases and Linux: http://blog.onefreevoice.com/
• The MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition announcement: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-5.1-use-case-competition.html

We timed our Use Case Competition to coincide with summer holidays, and are now prolonging the duration of the Use Case Competition with one month, until 30 September 2008.

To recap, here’s the original posting (with an updated deadline):

With 5.1 having officially been in Release Candidate status since September 2007 and soon approaching GA status, the MySQL Community Team launches a competition for the users of new features of MySQL 5.1:

Submit your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report to community(at)mysql.com by 30 September 2008 and have a chance of winning one of our prizes:

• 1st-3rd prize: A MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius
• 4th-10th prize: MySQL Community Contributor T-shirts
• 11th-20th prize: A Sakila mascot (MySQL’s pet dolphin)

You may phrase your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report freely, but the more colour you give it, the better your chances of winning.

By submitting the report, you also volunteer for appearing in our upcoming Use Case articles. We will consider any data you submit in your Use Case Report as public and quotable in our reports. However, you may ask us to anonymise certain aspects of your use case, should you otherwise not be able to participate in our competition.

This is the desired format of your submissions:

From: <you>
To: Community(at)mysql.com
Cc: <any of your colleagues you wish to inform>
Subject: MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report: <Feature> / <App Name>

MySQL Community Team,

At <company/organisation> we've used <new 5.1 feature> since <date>.

We're now on MySQL 5.1.<n> and we started development using
<new 5.1 feature> with MySQL.5.1.<m>.

Purpose of our appication:

Reason we need <new 5.1 feature>:

Development environment, OS, language:

Deployment environment, OS, hardware:

Relevant metrics on size/type of application:

Our comment on how <new 5.1 feature> meets our needs:
- comments on usability of feature
- comments on clarity of documentation
- comments on performance
- comments on bugs encountered [1]

Our greetings to the MySQL Engineering Team:

Name and email of submitter / developer:

Name of organisation:

Geographic location (city, country):

MySQL Enterprise customer: (YES/NO)

[1] If you’ve found bugs, then please follow our bug reporting instructions and share bug numbers from bugs.mysql.com in your use case report.

We’re looking for Use Cases on all new MySQL 5.1 features, but especially on

• Partitioning: Doc * Forum * Articles JonS & PeterG, RobinS, RS2, Giuseppe
• Row-Based Replication: Doc * Forum
• Event Scheduler: Doc * Forum
• Logs on demand / Table logging: Doc * Forum * Article Giuseppe
• Plugin API: Doc
• XML functions: Doc * Article: Bar & PeterG
• but also other improvements: Doc *Article Jay

Links:

• MySQL 5.1 Article Recap: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-5.1-recap.html

With 5.1 having officially been in Release Candidate status since September 2007 and soon approaching GA status, the MySQL Community Team launches a competition for the users of new features of MySQL 5.1:

Submit your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report to community(at)mysql.com by 31 August 2008 and have a chance of winning one of our prizes:

• 1st-3rd prize: A MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius
• 4th-10th prize: MySQL Community Contributor T-shirts
• 11th-20th prize: A Sakila mascot (MySQL’s pet dolphin)

You may phrase your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report freely, but the more colour you give it, the better your chances of winning.

By submitting the report, you also volunteer for appearing in our upcoming Use Case articles. We will consider any data you submit in your Use Case Report as public and quotable in our reports. However, you may ask us to anonymise certain aspects of your use case, should you otherwise not be able to participate in our competition.

This is the desired format of your submissions:

From: <you>
To: Community(at)mysql.com
Cc: <any of your colleagues you wish to inform>
Subject: MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report: <Feature> / <App Name>

MySQL Community Team,

At <company/organisation> we've used <new 5.1 feature> since <date>.

We're now on MySQL 5.1.<n> and we started development using
<new 5.1 feature> with MySQL.5.1.<m>.

Purpose of our appication:

Reason we need <new 5.1 feature>:

Development environment, OS, language:

Deployment environment, OS, hardware:

Relevant metrics on size/type of application:

Our comment on how <new 5.1 feature> meets our needs:
- comments on usability of feature
- comments on clarity of documentation
- comments on performance
- comments on bugs encountered [1]

Our greetings to the MySQL Engineering Team:

Name and email of submitter / developer:

Name of organisation:

Geographic location (city, country):

MySQL Enterprise customer: (YES/NO)

[1] If you’ve found bugs, then please follow our bug reporting instructions and share bug numbers from bugs.mysql.com in your use case report.

We’re looking for Use Cases on all new MySQL 5.1 features, but especially on

• Partitioning: Doc * Forum * Articles JonS & PeterG, RobinS, RS2, Giuseppe
• Row-Based Replication: Doc * Forum
• Event Scheduler: Doc * Forum
• Logs on demand / Table logging: Doc * Forum * Article Giuseppe
• Plugin API: Doc
• XML functions: Doc * Article: Bar & PeterG
• but also other improvements: Doc *Article Jay

Links:

• MySQL 5.1 Article Recap: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-5.1-recap.html