TheOpenForce.com

Penguin Crazy

From LinuxWorld this week in San Francisco, me, Tux and Larry Augustin...

And then some time later...

I think someone spiked my drink!

Andrii Nikitin Needs Our Help

 

Andrii Nikitin, one of the MySQL support engineers located in Ukraine, has asked for help from MySQLers and so I'm sharing this information to the community at large.  Andrii's son Ivan, who is 2 1/2, is in need of a bone marrow transplant operation.  This will require going to a clinic in Europe that will not be covered by regular insurance.  So Andrii has aksed to see if we could help raise funds.  The cost is expected to be $150,000 - $250,000.  A huge amount for an engineer from Ukraine to cover.   But a small amount by many people could make a big difference. 

Many MySQLers have kicked in to help out, but more is needed.  Ivan's health has taken a turn for the worse recently and the issue is now quite pressing.   Even a small donation could mean the difference between life and death for Ivan. 

I hope some of you who use MySQL or have young kids will join me in making a donation today.  You can do so by using Paypal, by sending a check to MySQL, or via wire transfer.

Paypal:
http://tinyurl.com/6rxjsz

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations&business=mysqlpaypal%40mysql%2ecom&item_name=Ivan%20Nikitin&no_shipping=0&no_note=1&tax=0¤cy_code=USD&lc=US&bn=PP%2dDonationsBF&charset=UTF%2d8

Or by check payable to: MySQL, Inc.

Mail to: MySQL, Inc.
Attn: Linda Dong
20450 Stevens Creek Blvd #350
Cupertino, CA 95014

or US wire transfer: 
MySQL Inc: 7396643001
SWIFT: NDEAUS3N

or International wire transfer in any currency:
Bank: Nordea Bank
Bank address: Stockholm, Sweden
Bank account: 3259 17 03868
IBAN: SE27 3000 0000 0325 9170 3868
SWIFT: NDEASESS

Thanks to those who have donated already.  A child's life is precious and I hope we can give Ivan a chance.

Thanks to Jim Starkey, the Father of Falcon

Jim Starkey joined MySQL about 2 1/2 years ago when MySQL acquired his startup company, Netfrastructure.  Jim has a long history in the database industry having created several major databases over the years and we wanted him to take the core engine of Netfrastructure and integrate it into MySQL.  This became the Falcon project, which is now in Beta as part of MySQL 6.0 and is targeted at web applications and designed to exploit modern multi-core multi-processor systems.  I expect we'll see more updates to Falcon in the coming months as part of the 6.0 release process.  The next release will be 6.0.5 (in the next week or so) which will include many Falcon bug fixes, performance improvements as well as new backup capabilities. 

Jim has always been a classic entrepreneur at heart.  He's been a great technologist and architect for Falcon but I think he prefers coding something new to dealing with meetings.  So, while it's a disappointment that Jim has decided to leave MySQL, it's not a complete surprise.  Over the past year two years, we've built an entire team around Falcon and Jim's been able to step back from some of the day to day grind and let others shine.  Ann Harrison, who was also part of Netfrastructure is continuing in her role and we've got quite a bit of home grown talent as well as new engineers from Sun helping out on Falcon.  I'm sure Jim will continue to be active in the MySQL community and provide his insight and guidance when we need it.  And maybe we can save some really hard bugs for Jim to fix.

If Jim's past is any predictor of his future efforts, I'm sure he'll have some exciting new technology coming out at some point.  It's been great to work with him and we wish Jim all the best in his new project.

In the meantime, I remain excited about Falcon as well as the many storage engines that keep popping up, ranging from our oldest and most mature storage engine InnoDB that keeps innovating, to the latest version of PBXT as well as specialized engines for data warehousing like Infobright and Kickfire. 

InfoWorld Digest

Since I've been doing most of my blogging lately over at InfoWorld, I thought I'd provide a short digest of some of the top posts in recent months. I share the blog with Savio Rodrigues from IBM, but other than some overlap at the occasional conference, we blog independently.  (Yes, it's an old photo.)  Enjoy!

• Matt Asay gets frustrated
• Summer tech conferences
• Why Fake Steve Jobs is worth reading
• Is Apple eating into Vista?
• JavaOne: Diversity and freedom
• 3G iPhone?
• When does a product become a platform?
• Patrick O'Keefe on managing online forums
• Open Source Goat Rodeo
• State of Open Source
• Why adoption matters

Typically I try to write 3-4 posts per week over at InfoWorld and then post things that are more MySQL-related here on this blog. But I admit, it's getting harder and harder to maintain two three different blogs.

Marten Mickos in SJ Merc

Marten Mickos was profiled in this past weekend's San Jose Mercury News, the prominent Silicon Valley newspaper.  (In fact, they have the domain name www.SiliconValley.com among others.)

Integrating with Sun's products is an attractive thing, but it's not the main idea. The main idea of the acquisition and of our business generally is to be the platform for the Web economy. Now, with the help of Sun, we will be able to accelerate this.

We had in our field organization 200 people; Sun has 17,000. We have a lot of usage in the big corporations, but we haven't been able to sell to them and become key vendors for them yet. With Sun, we get instant access to the big Fortune 500 and Fortune 2000 customers.

And to those who do want more than the database, we'll be able to say, "If you need the operating system, the middleware, the hardware, the development environment, you can get that from us, too."

The interview covers MySQL's growth, integration with Sun, corporate culture, open source business models and more.  Also, you can learn 5 things about Marten...

Thanks Everyone!

Thanks to Jay Pipes and the conference team for putting together a great event and especially the top-notch keynotes. I think this is one reason we had such large attendence this year with more than 2,000 attendees. Also thanks to all the bloggers, speakers, session buddies, community members, users, boffers, drinkers, runners, sales people for bringing customers, alliance guys for getting sponsors, to engineering for shipping great products, marketing for promoting the conference, consultants for having great solutions, SEs for keeping us honest, support guys for meeting with customers and more...

There are some great conference photos from Duncan Davidson available on Flickr, including the one above of our community awards.