New IOUG MySQL Council; Dueling Conferences
Here's a MySQL announcement that surprisingly didn't make the news last week: The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) has just formed a new advisory group made up of MySQL community leaders and subject matter experts.
The membership roster of the new MySQL Council includes some prominent names in MySQL Land. Here's the list:
- Sarah Novotny, Blue Gecko
- Sheeri Cabral, PalominoDB
- Bradley Kuszmaul, Tokutek
- Giuseppe Maxia, Continuent
- Rob Wultsch, GoDaddy.com
- Matt Yonkovit, Percona
Sarah Novotny will serve as Council chairperson. The company she founded with J.J. Ecker and Chuck Edwards started out providing DBA services to users of Oracle's E-Business Suite in 2001, and now provides those services for Oracle, Oracle Applications, MySQL and SQL Server. So her appointment seems like a nice fit.
Sheeri Cabral, PalominoDB's Database Operations Manager, writes a lot about MySQL on her company blog, which I recommend. She wrote The MySQL Administrator's Bible (with Keith Murphy, Wiley, 2009).
Bradley Kuszmaul is the founder and chief architect at Tokutek, where he is commercializing research he conducted at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to speed up the maintenance of rich database indexes.
Giuseppe Maxia, a.k.a. "The Data Charmer," is a well-known figure in MySQL circles. He was the MySQL community team lead at Sun Microsystems; he now serves as the Director of Quality Assurance at Continuent.
Rob Wultsch is a senior MySQL DBA at Internet service provider GoDaddy.com; check out his "Everything MySQL" page.
Matt Yonkovit is principal consultant and infrastructure architect at Percona; he worked at MySQL and Sun Microsystems as a solution architect; check out his "Big DBA Head" blog.
"We are pleased to welcome these MySQL evangelists and volunteer leaders to IOUG," IOUG president Andy Flower said in a statement. "Their passion, independent perspectives, experience and collective knowledge of MySQL will provide a solid framework for us to support our members and those interested in the MySQL evolution. Their collective expert user perspective, insight and counsel will be leveraged as a respected voice of the MySQL community into Oracle…"
The formation of this new council is one of the IOUG's first big moves to embrace MySQL under Oracle. Flowers goes on to state: "In addition, the IOUG looks forward to providing education and proven best practices to the IOUG membership and Oracle customer community along with presenting unbiased viewpoints on MySQL trends and data.”
Which leads us to what really caught my eye about this announcement: the note in the press release that the new council will be "prominently involved" in the IOUG's COLLABORATE 11 conference, scheduled for April 10-14 in Orlando, Fla. This year's event will include a new conference within a conference focused on MySQL, with more than 75 sessions covering such topics as "Monitoring MySQL with Oracle Grid Control,""MySQL Troubleshooting 101,""SQL Injection Myths and Fallacies," and "The 7 (or So) Deadly MySQL Performance Sins."
Meanwhile, O'Reilly Media's annual MySQL Conference and Expo is set for virtually the same dates as the IOUG event (April 11-14), though it'll take place on the other side of the country in Santa Clara, Calif. Another potential conflict: Sarah Novotny is listed as a member of the O'Reilly event's program committee.
The O'Reilly event has been around for a while, so there's an old-school MySQL history there. It'll be interesting to see if and/or how the perception of MySQL under Oracle will differ at these two independent industry events.
Posted by John K. Waters on January 18, 2011