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I’m going to be at beCamp 2008, the followup to the first beCamp, which I sadly missed.

beCamp is a BarCamp un-conference. Tonight was about meeting, greeting, and throwing ideas at the wall to see which ones stick. Literally. We stuck pieces of paper on the wall with our ideas — things we can either talk about or want to hear about — and then scratched our votes on them to see which are popular.

I live and breathe MySQL for a decent part of the day, so I hesitated, but then stuck “MySQL Performance” on the wall. It got quite a few votes, so I assume will be giving a talk on MySQL performance basics at some point during the conference. (The exact schedule is probably being determined right now, in my absence, but I’m so tired right now that I’ll just take my chances on it not being at 8:00 AM tomorrow.) [edit: I just checked the website and there won’t be anything before 9:00, and the schedule is determined tomorrow. I did say I’m tired, right?]

See you there!

PS: if you want to meet some of my colleagues from my former employer, the Rimm-Kaufman Group, they’ll be there too, wearing the “We’re Hiring” t-shirts. They’re hiring, by the way.

A while ago I asked for people and/or organizations to sponsor development on Maatkit (formerly MySQL Toolkit) so I could take a week off work and improve the Table Sync tool. I asked for $2500 USD, but several companies have graciously offered to cover that and then some.

I'm very happy about this, as it will allow me to dedicate a solid week to fixing bugs and adding features. There's a lot of demand for the tools, and there are a dozen or so bug reports unresolved for the table-sync tool, which I personally want to fix as much as anyone. So I'm very grateful for the support.

Here are the companies who have promised their financial support:

MySQL AB

MySQL AB have offered $3000 USD in support. I had an email conversation with Mårten Mickos, MySQL's CEO, and he expressed his happiness about the project's success, and his pleasure in supporting the project:

We have seen you operate in the community and you always have constructive and good ideas. That's why we want to support you. Our goal with this is to stimulate innovation in the MySQL ecosystem.

I don't know how the idea to support the project started at MySQL AB, but that quote really tells me "we get it: we have a symbiotic relationship with our community of users." In a follow-up email, Jay Pipes wrote,

... MySQL wants to make it clear that we very much support and appreciate the work you've done on the toolkit. It has proven to be one of, if not the, most popular and successful open source ecosystem projects surrounding MySQL and for good reason. So, for your work and commitment to the project, a big thank you from MySQL. :)

Secondly, we would like to encourage you to be open and public about our support of you. The community team is always looking for opportunities such as the one which presented itself with your toolkit, and we want the outside community to know about our support and encouragement. Therefore, you have our blessing and encouragement to blog about the sponsorship of your development work. Please do let us know if and when you decide to blog about it. Remember also that this sponsorship is no strings attached. There is no expectation of specific work on our end.

Blue Ridge Internetworks

Blue Ridge Internetworks have offered $1000 USD in support. BRIworks, as they're known locally, is headquartered in the town where I live, Charlottesville, Virginia. They offer networking consulting and services. Jeff Cornejo, who offered the support to me, is a friend and used to work where I used to work, and several other highly respected friends and ex-co-workers work at BRIworks too. BRIworks provides Internet service and hosting for my employer.

Percona

Percona have offered $500 USD in support. Percona does high-performance website consulting, and are perhaps best known for having some of the world's top MySQL experts, including Peter Zaitsev and Vadim Tkachenko, two of the co-authors on High Performance MySQL, second edition.

The Rimm-Kaufman Group

Last, but absolutely not least, my employer, The Rimm-Kaufman Group, who do paid search marketing and website effectiveness consulting. They have let me spend a significant amount of time writing these tools for use on our own systems, and instead of keeping them in our own Subversion repository, allowed the code to be released as Free Software. The time I've spent on the tools has gone well above and beyond what we needed to get our work done. Finally, RKG has blessed my unpaid week off to work on the tools.

A big thanks is due to all of these companies and individuals, as well as other people who have contributed financially and otherwise.

Closing thoughts

I'm grateful for the sponsorship, but I think the real winners are the MySQL community, who have benefited a lot from Maatkit. It has made a lot of hard things easier and impossible things possible. If you're one of those who benefits from Free Software, I encourage you to patronize the businesses that believe in and support it. Four fine examples are listed above! Not coincidentally, all of them are the creme de la creme in their respective fields.

Finally, a quick journalistic note: I pre-approved this post with representatives from the companies I mentioned, because I respect their right to represent themselves as they wish, but the words are mine, not theirs.