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More MySQL keynote videos

Wednesday's conference keynote sessions included a presentation by Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party and a panel session on scalability hosted by Kaj "Gaius Baltar" Arno, VP of Community and official Sun Ambassador at MySQL.  The panel included a few of the high-volume websites using MySQL including (from left) Flickr, Fotolog, Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube. (Also, not shown in the photo, more modest web sites MySQL.com and Sun.com.)

I've posted some short video segments on YouTube.  There are also some videos from Tuesday's keynotes featuring Marten Mickos, Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green.

Photos & Video from the MySQL Conference

Here are some more photos from the MySQL conference during the keynote sessions.  I've also posted some video on YouTube.com with clips from presentations by Marten Mickos, Jonathan Schwartz and Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.

Update: I've added some more photos and videos from Wednesday also.

MySQL Conference Early Reg Deadline

We're heading into February and that means there's only a few weeks left until the MySQL Conference & Expo early registration expires.  This year's conference promises to be our biggest and best ever.  I suspect that a lot of the hot tutorials on performance tuning and new features will sell out early.  There will be sessions on our various storage engines including InnoDB, Cluster, Falcon and Maria -- a new "MyISAM with Crash Recovery" engine that Monty and several other long-time MySQLers have been working on.  There will also be tons of BOF sessions going late into the evenings, and some great keynotes.  Heck, I think we can get Jonathan Schwartz up on stage this year!

• MySQL Conference: Main site, Sessions, Tutorials, Speakers, Registration, Exhibitors

Sun + MySQL = Awesome

Today we have 400 some MySQL employees gathered in Orlando for our all-company meeting that kicks off separate departmental meetings for Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Services etc. Although we've routinely had all-engineering meetings and sales kickoffs every year, this is the first time in a couple of years we've gathered the entire company.

There's a tradition at these big meetings that there's always some kind of surprise. Could be a boat cruise along the Neckar river, or an offsite eco adventure in the Mexican jungle (food poisoning optional) or a trip to a local sauna.

This year I think we managed to surprise everyone with the news that Sun has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL.

Overnight, MySQL goes from being a small (but rapidly growing) company to being part of the Fortune 500. And with Marten Mickos at the helm inside of Sun, we can continue to stay the course delivering the world's most popular open source database. And with Sun, we will have more resources at our disposal to support users and customers worldwide. We will of course continue to support all our major platforms and languages. So if you're using MySQL on Linux, Windows, Mac OS/X or with PHP, Perl, Python, C#, C++, Ruby on Rails or something else, we will continue to provide top notch quality. If you're on Solaris or using GlassFish, NetBeans, Java, DTrace we'll probably come up with some pretty cool ideas in the coming months. Maybe you have ideas on how we can integrate? Let us know!

Will there be changes? Sure. No doubt we'll find ourselves integrating into internal systems and processes at Sun that we don't yet know about. But this opportunity gives us the ability to provide an even bigger impact in the industry. To me that's very exciting. The management team and the founders are all on board to and fully support the acquisition.  And I'm personally looking forward to being part of Sun.

In the coming days and weeks we'll be updating people to answer questions the best we can. It will take a while to fully integrate the companies and that can only happen once the acquisition is officially closed pending customary government anti-trust review. But it's going to be a heckuva exciting time.

It's been a pretty harried few weeks for those working behind the scenes to make this happen, but I think the outcome is pretty amazing. Marten, Jonathan, congratulations on putting together the biggest open source deal in history!

• MySQL: News, Developer Zone, User Conference
• Sun: OpenSolaris, GlassFish, NetBeans, Java, DTrace

Why Telcos Are Going Open Source

 

While I'm doing most of my blogging these days over at InfoWorld, once in a while I'll post something over here that is more about MySQL.  Some folks likely saw our announcement with Virgin Mobile selecting MySQL Enterprise.  This is one in a long series of wins in the telecommunications industry in the last year.  It's been a rapidly growing part of our business and one that I'm particularly proud of.   

The mobile communications industry is going through a lot of changes --maybe even as many as the software industry.  It's being disrupted by digital technologies: VOIP, multi-media messaging, and more sophisticated smartphones that are essentially replacing PCs for many users.  (Some days it feels I do as much email on my Treo as on my PC.) 

So its interesting to see some of the industry disruptors, like Virgin Mobile, use open source as part of their business strategy.  In this case, Virgin Mobile is offering unlimited SMS messaging in order to expand their market.  If you're going to expand your market and your infrastructure, open source is really the only option.  Otherwise your infrastructure costs prevent you from doing what you need to do in order to be competetitive. Who wants to pay a "success penalty" where your infrastructure costs go up 50k in license fees per CPU?  It's not really a viable option.  And having facilities like MySQL Enterprise Monitor help ensure you've got 24x7 availability and are alerted to problems before they impact your systems.

PS. Yes, the photo above was me when I still looked respectable.  At our user conference they wanted to get a picture of me that was representative and I figured talking on my cell and drinking coffee was a pretty good snapshot.   

• MySQL: MySQL Enterprise, MyQL in Telco, Virgin Mobile Press Release

Nokia N810 and Maemo Developer Program

Nokia has announced an updated version of their Internet Tablet with the new N810.  This is a huge upgrade to an already solid device and platform.  Highlights of the N810 include:

• Slide out keyboard
• Faster CPU, faster boot times
• Built-in wi-fi and GPS
• 2 GB internal memory, expandable with Micro-SD cards
• Built-in Opera browser, email, media player
• Compatible with Skype, YouTube, Facebook etc
• Updated Linux Maemo user interface
• 4 hour battery life
• 800 x 480 display
• 5 x 2.83 x 0.55-inches, 7.97 ounces

The N810 looks like a great device and a great open source platform for developers.  Existing Maemo apps for the N800 likely need to be recompiled in order to fully use the new capabilities of the N810, but this should be pretty straightforward. 

Nokia has also announced a limited developer program with pricing for 99€, which makes it a no-brainer for anyone thinking of porting an app to the Maemo platform. This is way more interesting for developers than Palm's since-cancelled Foleo and arguably as good as the iPhone.  Though to be clear: the N810 does not offer cellular connectivity --which is admittedly ironic considering it's from Nokia. 

While I haven't got my hands on a N810 yet, at least on paper this looks like the ultimate in portable internet connectivity and may be powerful enough to leave behind the laptop, at least for use at conferences and meetings away from the office. The N810 will be available in November for a list price of $479.  You can read more about it at the links below.

• Engadget: Nokia N810 Gets Official, N810 Hands On
• MaemoApps: Initial Thoughts on N810
• Maemo.org: Developer Program, Downloads, Development, Docs, News

Adobe and Open Source

One of the marketing guys mentioned to me today that he saw Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen on CNN this morning reporting on their Q3 financial results.  The company grew by 41% year over year with record quarterly revenue of $851 million and operating income of $255 million. (Yes, those are quarterly figures!)  Chizen attributed the success to the strength of the recently released Creative Suite 3 and Acrobat.

MySQL is used by over a hundred different software ISVs and hardware OEMs for everything from telecommunications equipment to CRM and ERP systems.  But I'm particularly proud of the fact that Adobe uses MySQL in the Creative Suite 3 bundle.  I may never be able to explain to my in-laws exactly what it is that MySQL does, but at least I can point to a product on the shelves that they've heard of.  We highlighted Adobe's innovation as one of the Applications of the Year at our user conference in April.

Despite their large size, Adobe continues to be an innovative company, both in their products and in their development.  Not only do they leverage open source technology, they also contribute to it, open sourcing Flex, their web development framework earlier this year.

If there are other case studies you'd like to hear about MySQL, let me know.

• Adobe: Earnings call, Creative Suite 3, Flex FAQ, Open Source
• MySQL: Content & Workflow & Management, Adobe Case Study (PDF)

Fake Larry Ellison on MySQL

The Fake Larry Ellison blog cracks me up.  It started off on the Fake Steve Jobs blog, but now it's spun out to get its own separate blog.  Fake Larry Ellison is paranoid about open source and hangs out with Steve Jobs and Paris Hilton. I don't know if this is Dan Lyons or someone else behind this one, but it's quite funny. Maybe he'll be at Burning Man this weekend... Or is that Fake Burning Man?

• Fake Larry Ellison: Main, On MySQL, On Sun, On Apple

Hyperspeed Scale-Out

Here's an interesting problem to have.  What happens when your company starts scaling out in a matter of hours or days to traffic levels that would have normally taken years?  That's the situation that music site www.iLike.com (formerly GarageBand) faced after they launched May 23. They started getting tens of thousands of new users hourly through Facebook and eventually went from a million users to over 6 million in and the space of a few weeks, begging and borrowing more servers from VCs to keep things going.  They reached an audience size in weeks that it took Rhapsody years to achieve.  Now that's a fast pace of scale out!  They announced on June 11 that they are now the fastest growing music website. Heck, its probably worth making iLike our honorary 13th example in our 12 Days of Scale-Out feature on our web site.

The company President is ex-Microsoft VP Hadi Partovi who was previously General Manager of the MSN portal.  However, like most new web-based startups, iLike is built on the open source LAMP stack.  While it's possible that a Microsoft-only stack might have been able to scale, I would think the cost would be prohibitive.  Even if you just assume a nominal fee like $5k per server times 150 servers, that's $750,000, which is not chump change --even to ex-Microsoft millionaires.   

• Seattle Times: Crazy Love When Startup iLike hits Pay Dirt
• Seattle PI: iLike -A Way to Find Your New Favorite Songs
• iLike.com: Home, News, Team Blog

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Scale Out in China

With our current focus on the "12 Days of Scale Out" I thought I'd mention some observations from a recent visit to China.  I was there mostly on vacation, but I was able to spend a couple of days on the front end in some meetings with customers and press in Beijing through our partner there, Great Open Source.

The highlight of my visit was meetings with Sina.com (the largest portal in China) and Baidu.com (the largest search engine company).  Both are large scale users of MySQL with literally hundreds of MySQL servers at the core of their operations.

These companies have to deal with the same challenges as their US or European counterparts, but with some added complexity due to handling of chinese characters.  While the MySQL documentation is available in Chinese, there's still a need for more technical training, consulting and local best practices.  And I was thrilled that we had so many attendees from China at our users conference back in May.  That's a long trip to make for a conference!   Hopefully we can start to do more local activities through our partner to help expand the market in China.

This was my first trip to China and I was really struck by the enormity of the scale of things.  China has one fourth of the world's population and already is the #1 market for cell phones and the #2 market for PCs, behind the US. There are about 144 million internet users in China and that number is growing rapidly.  There are more than 20 cities with a population of 5 million and there are mega cities like Beijing with more than 15 million or Shanghai with more than 18 million.

The IT industry is growing rapidly as a result, and I was impressed to see so many young people working hard.  Indeed, things at Baidu.com and Sina.com were not so different from the early stages of Google or Yahoo.  And indeed, both companies appear to be beating their US counterparts in the local market, though revenues are still small by US standards.  (And interesting to note that Google has now teamed up with Sina.com.)

There is also a huge talent pool of engineers in China.  Beijing has a dozen universities and colleges including top-notch computer science programs.  Xian, the location where the Terracotta warriers were discovered back in the 1970s is home to more than 40 universities and colleges.  China graduates more students in computer science than any other country in the world.  So if you want my advice, make sure your kids are learning Mandarin.  It may come in handy...

• MySQL: 12 Days of Scale Out
• ITWeek: Sina Reports Surge in Revenues
• Red Herring: Google Powers China's Sina
• China Daily: Sina, Google Team Up