Business

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, Jeff Rothschild of Facebook.com delivered a keynote entitled "A Match Made in Heaven? The Social Graph and the Database". See people's blog posts on the Forge at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008ThursdayNotes#A_Match_Made_in_Heaven.3F_The_Social_Graph_and_the_Database

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party delivered a keynote on "Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties".

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party delivered a keynote on "Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties".

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Werner Vogels of Amazon.com delivered a keynote called "A Head in the Cloud -- The Power of Infrastructure as a Service". See all the blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008TuesdayNotes#A_Head_in_the_Cloud_-_The_Power_of_Infrastructure_as_a_Service.

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Mårten Mickos delivered the "State of the Dolphin Keynote". See all the blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008TuesdayNotes#State_of_MySQL.

Firstly, I finally realized who Jonathan Schwartz reminds me of: That's right, comedian and magician Penn Jillette. Schwartz started by saying, "enough of this free software stuff!" It got lots of laughs. He started to talk about Sun's agenda, and mentioned that MySQL and Sun had similar values, as well as similar dysfunctions as well -- particularly that each engineer has his/her own opinion. But Schwartz goes on in earnest to say "The future will be defined by free....and freedom," that "freedom is a price tag *and* a philosophy." I agree completely. He sees "the network is a social utility" much like heat and electricity are utilities. His talk somewhat reminded me of the Free as in Water post I made in June 2007. He finished up by comparing the Amazon River to Sun -- The Amazon River is really ecosystem of many rivers -- 10,000 smaller rivers. Sun is really an ecosystem of many communities -- Java, Open Office, Solaris, Open Solaris, MySQL, and so on. I was very pleased to hear that he feels that community is not only inclusive of all users, paid or otherwise, but that the ecosystem cannot exist without each part of that "smaller river" contributing to the whole. And *that* is Sun's agenda, to continue to build that river, so if one part has problems, the entire river is not damaged. Also, Sun has a quote that "innovation happens elsewhere," so it is crucial to build those bridges (mixed metaphor unintended) so that Sun can support and enable the innovation. In a world where diversity is key, this is an excellent message. Bravo, Jonathan!

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Sun Microsystems recently announced the purchase of MySQL. In this interview the day of the announcement, OurSQL asks Brian Aker about what this means for customers, community, Sun and MySQL.

Tell us what you think of Sun buying MySQL by calling the comment line or sending your voice through Odeo!

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(The Executive Summary: I left my job last week, and I start working at The Pythian Group on Monday. Go to their website if you’d like to work with me, or with people just as knowledgeable as me.)
I get inquiries all the time about consulting. Folks are madly searching for experienced MySQL DBAs. The lure of a new environment is always tempting, however, working for any one environment has its quirks. In October I realized I was coming up on having worked 2 years at my job. That’s not a very long period of time, but it certainly was long enough for me to learn the environment and get stuck in a rut — mostly my rut was doing more systems work than database work.

Peter makes an interesting post about the MySQL company’s trademarks at http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/10/26/mysql-support-or-support-for-mysql-mysql-trademark-policies/
The point is that Peter is not selling “MySQL Support” — he is selling “Support *for* MySQL”. “MySQL Support” is the name of a product that MySQL offers. Even if some other consulting company used the name before the MySQL company ever did, MySQL still has the rights to the name.