Dave Stokes and I tracked down Sarah Novotny Sunday night at the early bird registration for OSCON 2012. We had a few moments to interview her about MySQL Connect and her recent endeavors. I hope you enjoy:

Keith Larson: Thank you for joining us today.

Sarah Novotny: I am glad to be here.

Keith Larson: First just a general question, What were your thoughts when you heard that Oracle was going to do MySQL Connect ?

Sarah Novotny: I was very excited about it. I didn't expect Oracle to give us our own space. Even thought JavaOne had gotten that . JavaOne has existed as it's own conference before, and with the O'Reilly Conference no longer happening,  I didn't expect it and I was surprised. I know the first year after Oracle purchased MySQL, we had MySQL Sunday, which was great. We were told that this was such a big deal and it is really only a transition thing and with 140+ products nobody gets a big name …

Over the past few weeks since joining SkySQL as CEO, I have been meeting with team members to learn more about each person's views on the company, our customers and the industry. The team has done an amazing job since this company of original MySQLers re-emerged onto the scene more than a year and a half ago. We now have over 300 customers globally with very high satisfaction on the quality of services provided. July has for me been all about understanding the unique company culture and heritage from MySQL, and how we as a team can capitalize on our strengths to solve the challenges that our customers face while increasing the attractiveness of the MySQL ecosystem and community.

…

If you haven't already registered for MySQL Connect, now is the time to do it.

Looking for the right reason to attend? Here are the TOP THREE REASONS...

• You'll get the chance to hear directly from users including PayPal, Verizon, Twitter, Facebook, Ticketmaster, Ning, Mozilla, CERN, Yahoo! and more, about best practices for deploying MySQL based solutions.
• Don't miss this unique opportunity to meet the engineers developing and supporting the MySQL products, all in a single location. You'll be able to ask them all your questions and provide them feedback.
• Acquire detailed knowledge about the latest …

This past week I attended OSCon, the annual conference for open source’s true believers. And there was a religious fervor in the air, particularly from the point of view of someone more accustomed to Oracle conferences.

And if open source is the religion, proprietary closed-source companies are the devil. That having been said, I was surprised how virtually all large companies were demonized. Even long-time defenders of open source like IBM were ignored at best. That didn’t prevent them from coming though, with Microsoft and HP in particular with high-profile sponsorships and PR offensives that didn’t seem to have much influence with the crowd.

The companies generating buzz were the small companies built around development of their own open source products. There are a surprising number of them out there, especially relating to multiple forks of a popular product like MySQL or …

Forge was intended to be a community wiki resource for sharing information with each other.   However, over the last few years, we have seen Forge used less and less by MySQL Community, and more by spammers. What happened?

MySQL Worklogs and MySQL Internals documentation will be moved to dev.mysql.com and with new anti spam measures in place.
The MySQL Wiki, which was the primary focus of forge.mysql.com has been migrated to https://wikis.oracle.com/display/mysql
MySQL Forge will EOL on August 1st 2012.

Ronald Bradford,  an Oracle ACE Director has been busy working with  database consulting, book writing (EffectiveMySQL) while traveling and speaking around the world in support of MySQL. I was able to take some of his time to get an interview on this thoughts about theMySQL Connect conference.

Keith Larson: What where your thoughts when you heard that Oracle was going to provide the community the MySQL Conference ?

Ronald Bradford: Oracle …

Managing a MySQL database server can become a full time job. In many occasions, one MySQL DBA needs to manage multiple, even tens of, MySQL servers, and tools that bundle a set of related tasks into a common utility can be a big time saver, allowing you spend more time improving performance and less time executing repeating tasks. While there are several such utility libraries to choose, it is often the case that you need to customize them to your needs. The MySQL Utilities library is the answer to that need. It is open source so you can modify and expand it as you see fit.

In the latest episode of the "Meet the MySQL Experts" podcast series, Chuck Bell, Sr. MySQL Software Developer at Oracle, introduces a variety of recently released MySQL Utilities, and how DBAs can save significant time using the …

It is not a secret that we’ve been kicking the tires and playing with JIRA for project management. After using it since the beginning of the year most of us like the feel of it and we’ve decided that it makes sense to start using it more.

As you know, the MariaDB project has many fragmented resources. We report bugs in Launchpad. We store our plans in worklog. We’ve never used the Launchpad Blueprint feature for this very reason. We don’t use Launchpad Answers because we have the Knowledgebase.

With this move to hosted JIRA (yes, this is an important link: …

Do you want to closely follow what MySQL is doing around the globe? We've created a Lanyrd guide just for that. It's curated by the MySQL Community, Marketing, Presales and Product Management teams and with some other contributions too.
Tomorrow we'll host the MySQL Innovation Day (in streaming too) and MySQL Connect is also quickly approaching. If you'd like showcase your products and services to the MySQL Community you can take advantage of the various sponsorship opportunities.

Stay tuned for the latest and greatest updates from the MySQL team at Oracle and from our vibrant community!
…

We’re quite happy that we’ve released four major releases that are production ready (better known as generally available or GA in the MySQL world) in the last 26 months. That is just a little over two years, and a whole lot of features. In that same time, MySQL has seen one GA release (MySQL 5.5) and we’re all eagerly awaiting the upcoming MySQL 5.6.

You’ll note that we built MariaDB 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 based on the MySQL 5.1 codebase. A significant number of features went into MariaDB 5.3 (our biggest GA release to date), with the biggest changes in the optimizer in over a decade. There were also many replication based …