It's finally official — please join me in welcoming my new/old colleague Dave Stokes, who just joined the MySQL Community Relations Team at Oracle as the new MySQL community manager for North America. Some of you may remember him from a previous stint at MySQL, where he was in charge of the MySQL certification program. Back then, he was already running the North Texas MySQL Users Group and a regular blogger on Planet MySQL. I am sure we will be seeing much more of these kind of activities from now on. So welcome aboard, Dave! I look forward to working with you.

Yesterday afternoon I returned from the SAPO CodeBits 2010 conference, which took place in Lisbon, Portugal. Just like the previous year, CodeBits has been a great conference to be at and I am grateful for having been selected for participation. Thursday, the first conference day was quite a busy one for me — I gave two presentations in a row:

• What's new in MySQL 5.5? (Slides)
• How to build you own Quadrocopter (Slides)

Afterwards, I also participated in a panel discussion about " …

Topics for this podcast:

*Our latest CAOS Special Report – Control and Community
*Red Hat releases RHEL 6
*Symbian and Oracle highlight community challenges
*The latest on government adoption of OSS from GOSCON
*Open core issue continues, now with Linux and evil twins

iTunes or direct download (31:02, 8.5MB)

The Apache Software Foundation’s latest statement on the Java Community Process highlights continued dissatisfaction and dissent from Oracle’s stewardship and involvement in open source software.

This comes after some ups and downs for Oracle and its oversight of Java and other open source software that was previously under the auspices of Sun Microsystems. Oracle started off on a rough path when it sued Google over its implementation of Java in Android without preemptively or clearly stating that it was not attacking open source. At about the same time, it let OpenSolaris die a slow, somewhat confusing death. …

Recently I tested our new segmented key cache feature for MyISAM in MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma for performance gains. You can check our new features in MariaDB 5.2 in our Ask Monty Knowledge Base

• What is in MariaDB 5.2

You will also find the details about the segmented key cache feature in our Knowledge Base at:

• Segmented key cache for MyISAM

We wrote a test in LUA for SysBench v0.5 called select_random_points.lua, to figure out the performance gain of splitting the key cache’s global mutex into several mutex under multi user load.

You can find all the details about the benchmark in our Knowledge Base article here:

• …

I've been informed about two upcoming events/conferences that are organized by the independent Oracle user groups of the respective countries. If you're nearby, how about submitting a talk about a MySQL-related topic?

On March 29, 2011 the the Oracle Benelux User Group will have their yearly OBUG Benelux Connect 2011 conference, which will take place in Brussels, Belgium. You can submit your proposal until December 3rd, 2010 via this link.

On May 19th and 20th, …

You probably saw the Twitter storm over Oracle's pricing changes and InnoDB in the last few days. The fear about Oracle removing InnoDB from the free version of MySQL was baseless -- it was just a misunderstanding. Still, in the years since MySQL has been acquired by Sun, and then by Oracle, many MySQL users have been uncertain about the future. We think it's important for us to make our own position and plans clear and public, so that there is no fear or doubt about what Percona will do.

We want to begin by saying "thank you" to those who built and maintained MySQL over the years. Many of us at Percona came from the original MySQL team. We know that it took a decade-long group effort from Monty, David, Marten and many others to develop it into the world's leading open-source database. Much of their work is never publicly recognized, but it is the foundation of our own work, and we're indebted to it. MySQL development suffered some detours …

Links for today:

Community Rights and Community Wrongs
The Launch of the Document Foundation and the Oxymoron of Corporate Controlled "Community" Projects

Andy Updegrove makes observations of the trend in hosting Open Source projects in non-profit foundations rather than one company, much boosted by Oracle's acquisition and abandonment of Sun's software assets.

Knowing that an organization is “safe” to join, and will be managed for the benefit of the many and not of the privileged few, is one of the key attributes and assurances of “openness.”

read more …

It's that time of the year again — the nice folks at FOSDEM have granted us a developer room at their upcoming conference (February 5+6 2011 in Brussels, Belgium)!

As usual there were more applications than they were able to accommodate, so we are very grateful for this opportunity for collaboration. Titled "MySQL and Friends", our room next year will be H.2213 with a capacity of 100 seats. It will be at our disposal on Saturday 5th, from 13:00 till 19:00. Like last year, we would like to set up a schedule of talks related to the MySQL server and the various projects that surround it. Each talk will last 20 minutes, plus 5 minutes of Q&A and a 5 minute break for switching speakers, giving us 12 slots in total to fill with …

Right now, I would like to just say thank you to all my colleagues in the MySQL Team, and to all the community people with whom I have shared the wonderful experience of these four years.

And also, thanks to all the ones who have offered me a job. Really. There were many offers. I am sorry I could not …