Since the Sun acquisition and the following announcement of the Oracle acquisition, the owner of MySQL have been fairly silent in terms of stated directions of MySQL. This has allowed a lot of FUD to be spread throughout the user community. At the MySQL users conference there are going to be some excellent keynotes helping customers get an update on MySQL technology. It will be very interesting to see how the mind share of the user community is influenced by the keynotes this week. We can also expect in the future the Independent Oracle Users Group (
IOUG) which is the Oracle technology user group for DBAs, Unix Administrators and Developers increases its involvement with MySQL Then at Oracle Open World this fall we can also expect an more activity with MySQL and updates on the MySQL technology areas.
There was a lot of internal discussions on the vendor attendance, the mood and feel of the conference compared to last year, overall attendance and who is capturing the mind share of MySQL customers, developers and DBAs. Internal discussions by dolphins were also very, very interesting. It also appears that the maturity and popularity of MySQL has it breaking into different versions similar to how Unix separated into different derivatives back in the old days.
After Conference Links:
Conference Keynotes::
Tuesday, April 13
8:30am - 9:15am
State of the Dolphin Edward Screven
Highlights include MySQL 5.5 performance gains, MySQL Cluster 7.1, MySQL Enterprise Monitor enhancements and Oracle's LAMP stack.
9:15 - 10:00 Tim O'Reilly - Insights on cloud services, mobile devices, future. radar.oreilly.com may find interest. "Internet is really a data operating system".
Wednesday, April 14 Brian and Monty's keynotes are on two different visions of the MySQL and open source future.
8:30am - 9:15am
State of Drizzle Brian Aker
SQLite ubiquitous with embedded devices.
In two years SSD is going to be the common device
Why spend $3000 on consulting and instead spend $500 on a SSD device.
Drizzle removes a lot of unneeded features (bloat) in MySQL.
There will be no "Drizzle Inc/" for this MySQL fork. There will be people and companies who provide services around it.
They removed locks, go to lockless designs.
Future will have many core systems.
College students learning OO so C++ more important the C.
Drizzle - C++, Booth, SDL?
They have one blog type, don't use 3 byte integer.
Web is UTF-8. not Swedish, etc.
Drizzle 64bit, SSD, highly multicore, use external libraries, use C++/STL/Boost
Every two weeks a new release of drizzle. They use launch pad. All source code is there.
Everything is open source.
No table level locks.
Data dictionary is federated. No .frm file, no corruption in this case. Don't' want storage engine out of synch.
Highlights. 80+ code contributors within two years. This is never happened in two years at MySQL.
4 companies with core developers.
They have no warnings with GCC. If its a warning, its an error. Compiler is usually right.
Status of Drizzle today:
Default Engine has been transactional for over a year and passes all test cases.
Upgrades still require reload.
Replication is still under testing.
Presentation had vision, passion and a lot of interesting perspectives. Vision was very well received by attending audience.
Drizzle - is the only true fork. It won't be backward compatible with MySQL.
Maria is the glue that will put everything together.
Maria - MySQL descendants and cousins
Widenius announced an all-you-can-eat MariaDBa support model from Monty
Progam Ab: $36,000 for unlimited, company wide support for MySQL 3.3 upwards.
The next version of MariaDB is 5.2, will add transactional storage engines - Spider and Spinx - group commit and virtual columns.
MariaDB includes MariaDB, XtraDB and PBXT storage engines.
Thursday, April 15
Discussed some history of MySQL. Introduced new MySQL Oracle ACE Directors.
Presentation slides.
9:15am - 10:00am
The Engines Of Community Jono Bacon
Discussing community. "People join communities is to have a sense of belonging".
Talking about the mechanics of community: Communication channels, Structure, Collaboration and Environment. Don't want to create a community of fiefdoms. Need to make teams feel important.
"A shift in thinking and actions of citizens is more vital than a shift of thinking and actions of institutions and formal leaders." Community leaders need to understand technical work flow. Important not to over travel. Democracy does not work in a collaborate environment. Collaborate environments need to be based on meritocracies.
Author of the "
Art of Community".
