Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Where the MySQL Users Conference Should Consider Going

The MySQL Users Conference and the Oracle Collaborate Conference both finished last week.   Since that time there has been a pretty significant bitstream discussing where the MySQL Users Conference should go and what is it's future.  Here are a few insights and overviews of MySQL Users Conference:

Data in the Cloud - Marten Mickos - A perspective on where open source databases are going.

The MySQL user community is strong but it now has a lot of different leaders with different perspectives.   Can the MySQL user community generate enough leadership as a community to together take the MySQL users conference further?  Especially since this user community is very independent by nature. 

I believe the MySQL user community should consider trying to become the 4th spoke at the Collaborate 2012 Conference and be the open source section of the conference.  Or to try partnering with the IOUG in increasing the IOUG technical presentations with a large open source section.  It seems like the developers are going to want to have access to the different databases surrounding open source, so it is in the best interest of the open source user community to consider what is best for the group.

It will be interesting to see how the MySQL user community evolves in the next year.

3 comments:

LinuxJedi said...

The only way it would be possible for the MySQL community to be completely part of the IOUG is to segment the community into Oracle compatible and non-Oracle compatible (ie. MariaDB, Drizzle, Memcached, etc...).

I highly doubt that would/could ever happen since the community extends well beyond Oracle, and personally I think it would be a bad idea to segment the community.

Anonymous said...

I really wish you had not used tinyurls. I don't want to click through to something just to see where it's going.

rpbouman said...

George,

I'm kind of puzzled by your conclusion. I didn't visit collaborate so i don't know first hand, but from what I heard, interest was really low for the MySQL sessions. Even Tomas Ulin's session was visited by about 30 people (or so I heard)

Contrast that to O'Reilly's MySQL conference of 2011. Last year (2010), I felt unsure concerning the future of the conference mostly because of the forks and the uncertainty about MySQL's future under Oracle. I felt the mood was more pessimistic.

This year, I sensed lots of renewed enthusiasm and vigor. There were more people than last year (at least, it seemed so to me) and I thought the expo hall was better filled too as compared to last year (although there have been better years).

To me, one of the great things this year was the diversity. Somehow there was room for lots of complementary products (mostly NoSQL) as well as a separate PostgreSQL track, which I really enjoyed. I don't see how this setup could thrive under the banner of an Oracle-branded conference.

The future I envision is that next year, the interest in the MySQL conference will pick up even more, and if I'd be Oracle, I wouldn't let the opportunity to be main sponsor and reach out to the users pass me by a second time. I mean, it doens't seem to make sense from a business point of view to not utilize the opportunity of a gathering of users of your products.

anyway, just my 2cts worth...