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I was prompted following a few key words by Marten Mickos at the Sun Dinner on Wednesday evening, and subsequent one on one discussion with Marten, to post my thoughts of some significant news this week announced at the MySQL Conference. The decision to provide as it’s been termed is “Enterprise only features”. It is unfortunate this was not discussed in Marten’s opening keynote, having been exposed the evening before in the Partner’s meeting and hitting the blog sphere before the conference officially started.

MySQL, past, present and future as an Open Source company requires a functional business model to succeed. This includes the funding of resources and the technology progression. It is also necessary in this business climate to build a successful business quickly. How do you do this? Well that’s probably the difference between a successful CEO and an unsuccessful one, and what Marten Mickos has produced is clearly very successful.

I may not necessarily agree with the decisions made, more specifically not understanding at this time the rationale of which features are free and which are likely to be commercial, but I respect the decision made by Marten Mickos. These new feature considerations are in a future release of MySQL, they are also I’m sure not yet set in stone, however MySQL can not be all things to all people, no software can. It reminds me of the Homer Simpson car, designed to do everything Homer wanted in a car, but it bankrupted the previously successful company due the views of one individual to solve all their own needs, but not the needs of the majority. Who is affected by this decision, who will benefit, again it’s too early to tell.

Monty indicates this is a MySQL decision, not a Sun decision. This indicates the transition of MySQL to being under the Sun banner of the largest open source company is well, still in transition. Today it was again confirmed to me, that the MySQL database will always be GPL and MySQL will not never revoke the functionality that powers the world’s largest websites as free software for the database server.

As an advocate for the MySQL community, I’d like to consider myself one of the pulses, a thought in the MySQL conscious and even a vocal lobbyist. I am however not interested in being a disruptor in the MySQL ecosystem. A Communications Lesson on Slashdot I believe correctly states “Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL.” The headline is wrong.

A number of people have posted their comments, let’s stop bickering about it, and let’s see something positive happen for the benefit of the community. For example, as I’ve mentioned previously regarding the lack of differentiation for the Community version, again mentioned by Mark Callaghan in A better (community) HEAP engine where a worthwhile patch can’t be of benefit to the community in a binary release for the lay person.

As new COO of PrimeBase Technologies and in charge of the Business Solutions division, I am responsible for contributing to the success of the company, to play a significant role in the functional business model, to ensure funding for resources and technology progression. In other terms, how can revenue generation be achieved to fund prominently salaries of staff, including my own. How am I going to do this? This will be the difference between my huge success or not.

The slides from my 2008 MySQL Conference Presentation can be downloaded from here.

What would be great if people could create a single line (one tip) from each talk and we could aggregate these for an executive summary for tech people.

This was prompted from only a few minutes looking in on Baron Shwartz’s EXPLAIN presentation. What I didn’t know was.

EXPLAIN EXTENDED SELECT …; SHOW WARNINGS; gives the rewritten SQL query

If only I had time to whip out an application on my Google AppEngine and get twitter feeds with say a mysqlconf keyword. Perhaps we need a all night BoF hackfest to do it.

The 20 second summary from the Scaling MySQL - Up or Out? from our panel of experts at 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo.

• Paul Tuckfield from YouTube — The answers to everything is replication, you just have to rephrase the question.
• Jeff Rothschild from Facebook — Memory, the source of all problems is your developers.
• Domas for Wikipedia — You should be afraid that 10 min structural change may answer detailed problems.
• Fahan Mashraqi from Fotolog — Architect property, the most optimized schema may not be enough, what is the cost of serving the data, no just the time to run the SQL.
• John Allspaw from Flickr — There is nothing more permanent then a temporary solution
  matt Sun Performance tuning/Scaling increases is key
• Monty Taylor from MySQL — You have to know what’s happening on every piece of your technology stack.

At Day 1 of the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo today, our high numbers of attendees (reported at 2,000) have resulted in Standing Room only in a lot of talks. This has got to be excellent PR.

I got to sit in on the Memcached and MySQL session by Brian Aker and at the end I stuck my head in to Best Practices for Database Administrators by and Explain demystified by Baron Schwartz both 2008 MySQL Award winners.

All full to overfilling presentations.

Marten has opened the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo. This time he started in his opening comments “I have more to say to more people, and given less time to say it”.

His answer to why Sun bought MySQL included slides showing “Alignment in Culture and Vision” and “What’s in it for you - Performance & Scale, Support, Marketplace”.

This year the MySQL Conference has over 2,000 people and 55 exhibitors.

What was funny, was the photo showing the burning of the IPO Prospectus. Marten mentioned now with many Sun lawyers he has to be more careful what to day. I actually have an interesting extension to this at Watching what you say

Some points of note for me:

• The Web Economy continues to have exponential growth and the need for new technology but a goal of linear growth.
• Continuing to mention becoming “Disruptive Online Innovations”
• The Online landscape consists of the Software Development Model, Business Model,Software Deployment Model and Organisational Model.
• He Reiterated the Design Priorities at MySQL. Reliability, performance, easy of Use
• MySQL Workbench is now GA. Congratulations Michael Zinner.
• On Storage Engine Update, we as in PrimeBase, PBXT and Paul McCullagh got our 20 seconds of mention as predicated. In addition to he usual suspects, but ScaleDD & Tokutek are newly mentioned and are Exhibitors this year.

Ronald Bradford,
Chief Operating Officer (COO),
PrimeBase Technologies

The official press release of my commencement at PrimeBase Technologies can be now found at
Ronald Bradford strengthens management team and new open source initiative.

I’m very excited to be the COO, that’s Chief Operating Officer, rather impressive if you say it out loud a few times. My close friends and MySQL colleagues in the know in New York were also most impressed I’ve made CxO status during celebrations in recent previous weeks. My title was under wraps until I’d started.

What does COO mean at PrimeBase Technologies? I’m being charged with a number of things. I will responsible for the new Business Solutions division which includes helping to define the product road map for PrimeBase XT (PBXT) and Media Blob Streaming storage engines for MySQL. I’ll be looking at product enhancements, quality control and testing and verification of these and new products. I will also have a special focus on promoting PrimeBase Technologies to the MySQL community and commercial marketplace, hoping to leverage of the good start at the MySQL Community Awards 2007 where Paul McCullagh was named “Community Code Contributor of the Year”.

The continued success of our products including PBXT and Media Blob Streaming relies greatly on the community with your input of what is needed to help us best serve your needs always welcome.

We will be Exhibiting at the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo, Paul’s has presentations at the MySQL Conference on An Introduction to BLOB Streaming for MySQL Projectand Inside the PBXT Storage Engine and I have a presentation The top 20 design tips every data architect should know..

We are also planning a BoF session on Tuesday night.

Updated On good advice from Sheeri I made a few comments clearer.

We have proposed that the integral “MySQL Community Photo Day” be on Thursday April 17 2008, the final day of the MySQL Users Conference.

Wear a t-shirt from an open source community project on Thursday, whether a PrimeBase PBXT one or your favorite open source project (of course I prefer the first option). Get your photo taken with the masses of community supporters. If your not attending this year, this doesn’t mean you can’t also contribute a photo yourself from what location you are from. Save a saving fund for next year but get us a photo.

It doesn’t have to just be Thursday, we will accept photos at any time before then. Upload a photo and win a prize. (Baron you definitely get chocolate)
We have created a Flickr group called “MySQL Community Photo Day” at http://www.flickr.com/groups/mysqlcommunityphotoday

This is a chance for you to support the community. We have a small band of supporters before my post already including Colin C, Paul M, Lenz G, Baron S, Sheeri K.

The Conference Speakers of the 2008 MySQL Conference provides some common and interesting names of companies not common in MySQL circles such as eBay, Microsoft Corporation, HP, Symantec. I see speakers outside of MySQL from countries including USA, Canada, Brazil, Germany, Japan and Australia.

I did some data analysis of the speakers list. There are 150 speakers, there are 45 from MySQL. Other companies with multiple speakers include Sun Microsystems, Kickfire, Linbit, Cafepress, Open Query, Proven Scaling, Standford Linear Accelerate Center, UC Berkeley, Siz Apart, The Hive, Zmanda, MySQL Performance Blog, Infobright, Digg, Grazr and of course PrimeBase Technologies.

Only two MySQL speakers have listed “MySQL/Sun” the rest are “MySQL”. I wonder what the policy is here? You have “Oracle / Innobase” and “Innobase / Oracle Corp.” some identity crisis there, the guys from “MySQL Performance Blog” prefer this name over the company name “Percona”, obviously for brand exposure. You have “Grazr Corporation” and “Grazr Inc”. It’s only trivia but interesting.