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What do MySQL staff think of the acquisition?

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It finally dawned on me while reflecting on the year past this Sunday that the missing voice since the announcement of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems (and therefore MySQL) has been the MySQL employees.

When I worked as an employee for MySQL Inc, the acquisition by Sun Microsystems in 2008 lead to several requirements about the acquisition.

  • You were not allowed to talk about the acquisition publically.
  • You were not allowed to communicate with any Sun (i.e. the acquirer) resources.

In other words it was “business as usual” which is really an oxymoron, because business will never be exactly as it was before the announcement. The ongoing delay in pending acquisition by Oracle Corporation is really hurting everybody with getting on with doing their jobs, being happy with their work, and making a difference in open source and in the lives of all the benefit from using MySQL.

I’m sure many that have words to say are disappointed, worried or even fearful of their own future careers. Comments are always welcome via Mr Anonymous using 10 minute email.

What's new in MySQL 5.4.1

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Absolutely nothing?

5.4.0 was released with a change in the MySQL Binary distributions, delivering only 1 64bit Linux platform and two Sun Solaris platforms. This was officially announced on April 21 2009 however the 5.4.0 Release Notes state 05 April 2009. So it’s not a big deal, but consistency would be nice.

I’ve seen in a few posts 5.4.1, so I decided to try it out. Spending the time to read what’s changed in 2 months with the 5.4.1 Release Notes before I go downloading and installing, you read.

This release does not differ from 5.4.0 except that binary distributions are available for all MySQL-supported platforms.

Is this going to be the new policy from Sun? Release for Solaris platforms first, then later release for other platforms?

A change in the MySQL Binary distributions

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Yesterday was the surprise announcement of MySQL 5.4 at the 2009 MySQL Conference and Expo. It was unfortunate that the supporting information was not that forthcoming on the MySQL website. I tried for several hours to try and download, but no mirrors were initially available. Today I see some information on the mysql.com home page and finally able to get the binary.

What I found most significant with this new major version release is a change in the binary distribution, as seen on the Download page.

MySQL 5.4 is only available on 3 platforms:

  • Linux (AMD64 / Intel EM64T)
  • Solaris 10 (SPARC, 64-bit)
  • Solaris 10 (AMD64 / Intel EM64T, 64-bit)

I was also surprised that this beta release highlights the emphasis of community contributions (long overdue), yet the community and indeed many employees of Sun/MySQL were simply unaware of this work. This is clearly a change in involving the community. While I applaud the beta status, hopefully a more stable product to start with, it’s development was done in a very closed company model.

Where is the MySQL in Sun's announcement

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I find it surprising that in the official Sun Announcement there is no mention of MySQL for two reasons. Firstly, this was Sun largest single purchase of $1 billion only 12 months ago. Second, MySQL’s largest competitor is Oracle.

While the Sun website shows the news in grandeur, the MySQL website is noticeably absent in any information of it’s owners’ acquisition.

On my professional side, as an independent speaker for Sun Microsystems with plans for upcoming webinars and future speaking on “Best Practices in Migrating to MySQL from Oracle”, this news does not benefit my bottom line.

Classic quotes – Community One East

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The CommunityOne East 2009 conference has finished up. There were a few classic statements made by the speakers during the day. They included.

“We have a community reception, that’s a long way to say free beer.”

“Google is the dial tone of the Internet, if it’s not there people start freaking out.”

“I am an insom-maniac, a late night hacker.”

“Having a successful catastrophic – Achieving your marketing goals, and your site crashes due to the load.”

“Ruby is a beautiful expressive fun language.”

(talking about cloud providers) — “Lock-in, it’s like marriage, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

“It wasn’t a red carpet, but it was carpeted.”

Event: CommunityOne East in New York, NY.
Article Author: Ronald Bradford

Your Code, Your Community, Your Cloud… Project Kenai

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Following the opening keynote announcement about Kenai I ventured into a talk on Project Kenai.

With today’s economy, the drive is towards efficiency is certainly a key consideration, it was quoted that dedicated hosting servers only run at 30% efficiency.

An overview again of Cloud Computing

  • Economics – Pay as you go,
  • Developer Centric – rapid self provisioning, api-driven, faster deployment
  • Flexibility – standard services, elastic, on demand, multi-tenant

Types of Clouds

  • Public – pay as you go, multi-tenant application and services
  • Private – Cloud computing model run within a company’s own data center
  • Mixed – Mixed user of public and private clouds according to applications

SmugMug was referenced as a Mixed Cloud example.

Cloud Layers

  • Infrastructure as a Services – Basic storage and computer capabilities offer as a service (eg. AWS)
  • Platform as a Service – Developer platform with build-in services. e.g. Google App Engine
  • Software as Service – applications offered on demand over the network e.g salesforce.com

Some issues raised about this layers included.

  • IaaS issues include Service Level, Privacy, Security, Cost of Exit
  • PaaS interesting point, one that is the bane of MySQL performance tuning, that is instrumentation
  • SaaS nothing you need to download, you take the pieces you need, interact with the cloud. More services simply like doing your Tax online.

Sun offers Project Kenai as well as Zembly.

Project Kenai

  • A platform and ecosystem for developers.
  • Freely host open source projects and code.
  • Connect, community, collaborate and Code with peers
  • Eventually easily deploy application/services to “clouds”

Kenai Features

  • Code Repository with SVN, Mercurial, or an external repository
  • Issue tracking with bugzilla, jira
  • collaboration tools such as wiki, forums, mailing lists
  • document hosting
  • your profile
  • administrative role

Within Kenai you can open up to 5 open source projects and various metrics of the respositories, issue trackers, wiki etc.

The benefits were given as the features are integrated into your project, not distributed across different sites. Agile development within the project sees a release every 2 weeks. Integration with NetBeans and Eclipse is underway.

Kenai is targeted as being the core of the next generation of Sun’s collaboration tools. However when I asked for more details about uptake in Sun, it’s only a request, not a requirement for internal teams.

The API’s for the Sun Cloud are at http://kenai.com/projects/suncloudapis.

Event: CommunityOne East in New York, NY.
Presenter: Tori Wieldt, Sun Microsystems
Article Author: Ronald Bradford

Everybody is talking About Clouds

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From the opening keynote at CommunityOne East we begin with Everybody is talking About Clouds.

It’s difficult to get a good definition, the opening cloud definition today was Software/Platform/Storage/Database/Infrastructure as a service. Grid Computing, Visualization, Utility Computing, Application Hosting. Basically all the buzz words we currently know.

Cloud computing has the ideals of truly bringing a freedom of choice. For inside or outside of an enterprise, the lower the barrier, time and cost into freedom of choice give opportunities including:

  • Self-service provisioning
  • Scale up, Scale down.
  • Pay for only what you use.

Sun’s Vision has existed since 1984 with “The NETWORK is the Computer”.

Today, Sun’s View includes Many Clouds, Public and Private, Tuned up for different application needs, geographical, political, with a goal of being Open and Compatible.

How do we think into the future for developing and deploying into the cloud? The answer given today was, The Sun Open Cloud Platform which includes the set of core technologies, API’s and protocols that Sun hopes to see uptake among many different providers.

The Sun Cloud Platform

  • Products and Technologies – VirtualBox, Sun xVM, Q-Laser, MySQL
  • Expertise and Services
  • Partners – Zmanda, Rightscale, Kickapps
  • Open Communities – Glashfish, Java, Open Office, Zfs, Netbeans, Eucalyptus

The Sun Cloud includes:

  • Compute Service
  • Storage Service
  • Virtual Data Center
  • Open API – Public, RESTful, Java, Python, Ruby

The public API has been released today and is available under Kenai. It includes two key points:

  • Everything is a resource http GET, POST, PUT etc
  • A single starting point, other URI’s are discoverable.

What was initially showed was CLI interface exmaples, great to see this still is common, a demonstration using drag and drop via a web interface was also given, showing a load balanced, multi-teired, multi server environment. This was started and tested during the presentation.

Then Using Cyberduck (a WebDAV client on Mac OS/X) and being able to access the storage component at storage.network.com directly, then from Open Office you now get options to Get/Save to Cloud ( using TwoGuys.com, Virtual Data Center example document).

Seamless integration between the tools, and the service. That was impressive.

More information at sun.com/cloud. You can get more details also at the Sun Microsystems Unveils Open Cloud PlatformOfficial Press Release.

Event: CommunityOne East in New York, NY.
Article Author: Ronald Bradford

CommunityOne East – An open developer conference

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With an opening video from thru-you.com – an individual taking random you-tube video and producing video mashup’s, the CommunityOne East conference in New York, NY beings.

The opening introduction was by Chief Sustainability Officer Dave Douglas. Interesting job title.

His initial discussion was around what is the relationship between technology and society. A plug for his upcoming book “Citizen Engineer” – The responsibilities of a 21st Century Engineer. He quotes “Crisis loves an Innovation” by Jonathan Schwartz, and extends with “Crisis loves a Community”.

He asks us to consider the wider community ecosystem such as schools, towns, governments, NGO’s etc with our usage and knowledge of technology.

Event: CommunityOne East in New York, NY.
Author: Ronald Bradford

Hurting the little guy?

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Today I come back from the dentist, if that wasn’t bad enough news, I get an email from Google AdWords titled Your Google AdWords Approval Status.

In the email, all my AdWords campaigns are now disapproved, because of:

SUGGESTIONS:
-> Ad Content: Please remove the following trademark from your ad:
mysql.

Yeah right. I can’t put the word ‘MySQL’ in my ads. How are people to now find me? It would appear that many ads have been pulled not just mine. Is this a proactive measure by Google? is this a complaint from the MySQL trademark holder Sun Microsystems?

I’d like any comment, feedback or suggestions on how one can proceed here.

It reminds me of the days CentOS advertised itself as an “Open source provider of a popular North American Operating System”, or something of that nature.

An intestesting approach to free hosting

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I came across the OStatic Free hosting service that provide Solaris + Glassfish (Java Container) + MySQL.

They offer “Now you can get free Web hosting on Cloud Computing environment free of charge for up to 12 months. ”

The catch “accumulate 400 Points for participating on the site“.

A rather novel approach, you get 100 points for registering, but then only 5-15 points per task. The equates to approximately at least 30 tasks you need to perform, such as answering a question, or reviewing somebodies application. That seems like a lot of work?

In this case, Free has definitely a cost and time factor to consider.

VirtualBox, compiling Part 2

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So I managed to find all dependencies after some trial and error for compiling VirtualBox 1.6.4 under Ubuntu 8.0.4, then finding the Linux build instructions to confirm.

It was not successful however in building, throwing the following error:

kBuild: Compiling dyngen - dyngen.c
kBuild: Linking dyngen
kmk[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/VirtualBox-1.6.4/src/recompiler'
kmk[2]: Entering directory `/usr/local/VirtualBox-1.6.4/src/apps'
kmk[2]: pass_bldprogs: No such file or directory
kmk[2]: *** No rule to make target `pass_bldprogs'. Stop.
kmk[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/VirtualBox-1.6.4/src/apps'
kmk[1]: *** [pass_bldprogs_before] Error 2
kmk[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/Virtu

More searching, I needed to add two more files manually. Read More Here.

A long wait, compiling for 20+ minutes, and a necessary reboot as upgraded images threw another error, I got 1.6.4 running, and able to boot Fedora Core 9 image created under 1.5.6

But the real test, and the need for this version was to install Intrepid.

This also failed with a Kernel panic during boot. More info to see this reported as a Ubuntu Bug and Virtual Box Bug.

More work still needed.

Virtual Box, a world of hurt

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I successfully installed Virtual box via a few simply apt-get commands under Ubuntu 8.04 via these instructions.

It started fine, after two small annoying, install this module, add this group messages. I was even able to install Ubuntu Intrepid from .iso. But from here it was down hill.

Attempting to start VM gives the error.

This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU:
pae
Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for the CPU

Some digging around, and confirmation that the current packaged version of Virtual Box doesn’t support PAE. You think they could tell you before successfully installing an OS. I’m running 1.5.6, I need 1.6.x

$ dpkg -l | grep virtualbox
ii  virtualbox-ose                             1.5.6-dfsg-6ubuntu1                      x86 virtualization solution - binaries
ii  virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-19-generic   24.0.4                                   virtualbox-ose module for linux-image-2.6.24
ii  virtualbox-ose-source                      1.5.6-dfsg-6ubuntu1                      x86 virtualization solution - kernel module

Off to the Virtual Box Downloads to get 1.6.4
Don’t make the same mistake as I did and use the first download link, that’s the commercial version that doesn’t install what you expect, you need the OSE. Of course this is not packaged, it’s only source.

  ./configure
Checking for environment: Determined build machine: linux.x86, target machine: linux.x86, OK.
Checking for kBuild: found, OK.
Checking for gcc: found version 4.2.3, OK.
Checking for as86:
  ** as86 (variable AS86) not found!

Ok, well I go through this step like 4 times, installing one package at a time, I wish they could do a pre-check and give you all missing requirements. I installed bin86, bcc, iasl.

Then I got to the following error.

$ ./configure
...
Checking for libxml2:
  ** not found!

Well it’s installed, all too hard. Throw Virtual Box away for virtualization software. And why am I using it anyway. Because VMWare Server doesn’t work under Ubuntu 8.04 either because of some ancient gcc dependency. Sees I may have to go back to that. I just want a working virtualization people on the most popular Linux distro to install other current distros. It’s not a difficult request.

$ dpkg -l | grep libxml
ii  libxml-parser-perl                         2.34-4.3                                 Perl module for parsing XML files
ii  libxml-twig-perl                           1:3.32-1                                 Perl module for processing huge XML document
ii  libxml2                                    2.6.31.dfsg-2ubuntu1                     GNOME XML library
ii  libxml2-utils                              2.6.31.dfsg-2ubuntu1                     XML utilities
ii  python-libxml2                             2.6.31.dfsg-2ubuntu1                     Python bindings for the GNOME XML library

Project Darkstar

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It may sound like either a astronomical research project or a Star Wars spin- off, but Project Darkstar is an open source infrastructure from Sun Microsystems that states “simplify the development and operation of massively scalable online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications.”

The advertising sounds promising like many sites, the emphasis seems to be on gaming throughout the material, interesting they threw in the term “social networking applications” specifically in opening descriptions.

I believe worthy of investigation, if only to see how that solve some classic problems. So, Learn some more, Start your rockets and Participate.

Sun Stock Prices

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Sun Microsystem’s (NASDAQ:JAVA) hit a low this week of $8.71. There was a stronger rally and a close at $9.16 today. The financial times reports Sun Micro chief sees rays of hope, and Bloomberg Sun Rises After Fourth-Quarter Profit Tops Estimates.

I cashed out in March at $16.32, so that’s like a 50% drop in share price. I was lucky having been at MySQL long enough to have options to vest. Newer employees are not that lucky. I certainly hope MySQL Sun Employees get the Q4 weighted bonuses. (A structure I didn’t believe compensated with the old bonus structure).

I have been following more closely since Matt Asay’s comments in Who is buying Sun?



Image courtesy of Google Financial’s.

A few words from Jonathan Schwartz

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Following Marten Mickos, the second opening keynote at the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo was by Jonathan Schwartz CEO and President of Sun Microsystems. Blog

His opening joke was about dinner with Marten, to which Marten said “You not going to get a keynote, unless you buy the company.”

So what was striking for me in his presentation “What is Sun’s Agenda?”

  • There is no open-source phone yet, but that’s an industry that needs disrupting.
  • Like the need for water or electricity, The Network Has Become A Social Utility.
  • We want to work with the community, create greater innovation.
  • The future, the price tag of Free, the philosophy of Freedom

I had a chance to meet Jonathan and Rich Green on Sunday night, and it was great to see Jonathan learning about, and getting behind the product PBXT – The Community Engine a MySQL 5.1 open source engine.

A clarification of evil

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Earlier I wrote in The Sun Download Manager is evil a subsequent generalization, and I wanted to make a clarification. I stand my by title, but not that the entire company is evil. Perhaps are 1am and being tired, and rather peeved I could not download the free software with any ease I needed to as they say “sleep on it”.

Let me further detail why the Sun download manager is simply to never to be used without due consideration. You first have no choice, if you use the Sun Download Manager to download software (I’ll have to review if you even have an option not to use it), you must accept the SSL trust requirement, to not accept is to not use the download manager, so straight away you have no option (this is the path to being evil). When you accept the trust of the download manager, you are signing over your entire computer to the software to which you don’t know what it’s really going to do. This is in essence how a Trojan horse works. This is how software from other sources can deceive people, even destroy all information on your computer. Combined with the fact that the download manager does a really stupid thing and places files in the ‘root’ directory of your machine is also something you should never allow and never do.

I really want to bring this to the attention of people, because I have plenty of friends and family which don’t understand computers as much, and what’s possible, and if say the trusted a Java Applet from Sun, they might just do this next time with a program who’s intent is to destroy, damage or transmit information on your computer.

This leads to the real justification of virtualization and always doing any web surfing or use in a dedicated virtual environment, however until this becomes simpler for the end user it’s not easy to configure and explain to a less experienced user.

Filed Under: Sun

The Sun Download Manager is evil

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Well, following my rather unimpressed first attempt to download Open Solaris I registered a second account and this time it worked, go figure, there must be a “annoy MySQL ex employees feature there”.

The Sun Download manager kicks off with an Open .jnlp with Java Web Start (Screen 1), ok, whatever. You then get a SSL warning and well whatever as well (seems weird) (Screen 2), then the Download Manager kicks of downloads in this case 2.3GB (Screen 3).

So next day, I’m looking for the iso, can’t find in my ~/Downloads, and infact a search across my entire home directory does not find the .iso What the. You are telling me after all this I still don’t have the iso file.

Long story short, it’s been saved in the ‘root’ home directory i.e. ‘/’. Holy crap how can you do that, and any idiot knows you don’t put files there. The Options page, which you can get to after downloads (Screen 4) allows you to change the download directory, but the damage is already done. Scratching ones head to work out how without password access this was possible, you have to read the fine print as highlighted on screen 3. “Click Trust to use this application and allow it unrestricted access to your computer”. Well that’s just evil. Sun is now an evil company in my books.

Post note. So I move my files from ‘/’ obviously, and I don’t need ‘root’ permissions, just my normal user. This is really, really messed up.

macmarvin:~ rbradfor$ cd /
macmarvin:/ rbradfor$ ls -l
total 7616021
...
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root      wheel           1 Mar 13 10:27 net
drwxr-xr-x   6 rbradfor  staff         204 Nov 29 22:10 opt
drwxr-xr-x@  6 root      wheel         204 Oct 26 02:04 private
drwxr-xr-x@ 66 root      wheel        2244 Mar  5 19:38 sbin
-rw-r--r--   1 rbradfor  admin         341 Mar 26 02:55 sol-nv-b79b-md5sum-dvd-x86.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 rbradfor  admin  3878092800 Mar 26 13:12 sol-nv-b79b-x86-dvd.iso
-rw-r--r--   1 rbradfor  admin      205408 Mar 26 19:40 sol-nv-b79b-x86-dvd.iso.sdm




Filed Under: Sun

Things that piss me off

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So I decided to download Open Solaris tonight. Not only do you have to go through the pain of registering to download the free product, ok that’s understandable, you are forced to enter an Organization and a Phone Number, the first is impractical people, not everybody works or want’s to even tell you where they work, but phone number is completely unacceptable.

So, registered go to click on download and I get a most stupid error saying to enter a User Name and Password yet a few lines below it states I’m logged in, and there are no input boxes. So I entertain this annoyance, log out and log in again to get the same result (why did I expect a different result).

So Sun, if you don’t want me to download the software, just say so next time.

I should add it’s 1am, the end of my day so perhaps it’s time out.

Filed Under: Sun

NY PHP – Sun & MySQL: A New Hope

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Tonight’s New York PHP community meeting was a talk by Philip Antoniades the MySQL Systems Engineering Manager.

With an interesting topic opener “A New Hope” I could not resist to hear Philip’s official MySQL presentation.

Some small points I took away from the presentation.

  • Sun is committed to Postgres with Josh Berkus and a team of 20 people.
  • Solaris.next is the next version of Sun, I thought that was a cool internal name, be it obvious
  • A marketing slide of the highest traffic websites listed Meebo, yousendit, alexaholic, techcrunch, feedburneer, istockphoto and vimeo as reported by Pingdom. Not sure were they get their data, but Google, Yahoo, FaceBook, Wikipedia, MySpace, Fotolog are sites I think of as high traffic. Indeed 3 of these listed sites I’ve never heard of.
  • MySQL 5.1 is expected GA in late Q2 (no year was mentioned).
  • Falcon in 6.0 was listed as the “Next Generation” transaction Storage Engine, an interesting term I’d not heard of before.
  • Sun provides Hosted Database Services (i.e. the cloud) via network.com.
  • MySQL has had an influx of Sun Engineers (60-80).
  • MySQL is being benchmarked more on Sun H/W.

This talk did remind me it’s time to download Open Solaris. With the interesting comment that out of some 1,200 Sun Engineers over 1,000 were Macbook users gives me great confidence it will work just fine on my Macbook.

Out of other discussions there was talk of ZFS, so this will be interesting in what backup opportunities for MySQL without a true Online Backup solution may exist.
Also there was discussion with Sun’s GUI Tool NetBeans, and this casts light on how this will sit with the MySQL GUI team and MySQL Workbench.

Interesting times, this new hope.

MySQL graphics and words in use

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Not sure during my vacation which part of the creative brain has taken over, but I’ve become rather obsessed with marketing graphics and associated words being used across the MySQL and Sun MySQL websites, (See previous examples here and here).

Here are a number of more interesting references from the front page of the www.mysql.com site.

  • The MySQL website now has a MySQL/Sun logo, noting it starts with the MySQL logo first.
  • MySQL & SUN Come together. Freedom & Innovation Fast, innovative, open database solution now with world class service and support (dolphin jumping at sunset)
  • Unlimited Possibilities. Deploy an unlimited number of MySQL Enterprise Servers for the cost of a single CPU of Oracle Enterprise Edition (two dolphin jumping across a moonlight night scape)

The haven’t got to the MySQL Conference website yet, I guess that’s controlled by O’Reilly still for now.

Words and images remain the property of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Copyright 1994-2008.
Comments on this site reflect the personal opinion of the author and may not reflect the opinion of any present or past employers.

Where is the Sun MySQL Reference Manual?

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Yesterday I mentioned the new The official Sun-MySQL WebSite. It interested me with the navigation, graphics and content used to describe MySQL.

Greg of One Free Voice in a comment raised a very valid question, he could not find the MySQL Reference Manual, see comments. (I should also point out Greg it is no shame to reference the MySQL manual even daily, I’m an expert in the field and I easily reference the manual multiple times a week, and for reference the single most important page for me is Option and Variable Reference. I’ve also forgotten when using multiple languages in MySQL what is OFF/ON, simple solution is in the mysql client go SELECT ON; and see it it’s 1 or 0.)

Well, I didn’t find a link to the MySQL reference manual on the Sun Website. I’m sure it’s there somewhere but this leads to the question of design. The MySQL www.mysql.com got an overhaul several months ago, and the navigation was clearly improved down to two clear menus, see below. Now the Sun MySQL page has 4 separate menus (even the forth I missed yesterday), see below. This new menu even discovered another interesting graphic and comment to add to my list yesterday.

  • Community – 11 Million and growing (Picture the bottom have of marathon runners)

Words and images remain the property of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Copyright 1994-2008.
Comments on this site reflect the personal opinion of the author and may not reflect the opinion of any present or past employers.

My Ideas for MySQL Camp III

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Diary: January 21st 2008 – Martin Luther King Day (Day doctor’s practices are closed BTW.)

“I have a dream”, poetic . Actually I have thumping 5 day straight headache but that’s another story.

I have a dream for MySQL Camp III. A 48 hour Global Hackfest. I ran this by Jay over Thanksgiving, to get back to more the purpose of the Camp, for hackers, coders and the very experience to get to together to share their skills, and for those at the top of our respective game to learn just a little more. MySQL Camp II was a success to attendees in general, but of little value to the experts.

I hope to get us middle to advanced ground. Here is an overview.

  • 48 hour event
  • Say 12pm Friday GMT to 12pm Sunday GMT
  • Global meeting points of two or more to work together, sleep, eat and play together (in fact the goal is not to attend alone, you should really try to get to at least the closest person that’s also attending, it’s designed to be a distributed group event)
  • 4 key areas
    • Getting Starrted. Getting the code, understanding the basics of compiling – Linux, Mac OS/X and Windoze. CLI & IDE debugging options
    • A&D. Analysis of problems, selected bugs, existing patches etc, reviewing procedures, documentation requirements, important of test plans etc. Laying down a plan on what’s going to happen, how long it’s going to take etc.
    • Doing it. Taking a working developer environment, and a set plan, and executing to completion
    • Reviewing it. Getting an insite into MySQL and how bug fixes, community contributions etc are submitted, reviewed, proposed and received
  • I would anticipate we would run say 2 or 3 tracks of these 4 points, so we would repeat stuff, perhaps a different problem, but this enables you to get a real grip, as well as cater for the 24hr cycle.
  • I could see the Doing it interesting, perhaps depending on attendees either a mentor process where a code guru could instruct some youngerlings, or multiple teams working in parallel on the same problem, a little bit of competition.
  • Code base line version and list of bugs/features to be looked at to be pre-determined, so we have a clear structure during the event. This will be proposal format, and may include for example back porting patches for example.
  • We will definitely be having some prizes and some fun, it’s going to be one of those work to 3am in the morning weekends regardless of where you live.

I expect to run this format of MySQL Camp twice, the first to work out any serious problems. I had hoped in November last year to get this before UC2008, fat chance, but I’m proposing a MySQL UC2008 a BOF on the subject.

I had spoken with good friend Farshan Mashraqi that had done some good Sun webinars recently and he was seeking a contact to see if Sun could donate the time/bandwidth for the electronic component or even sponsor. (This was clearly discussed late last year) Seems now this may be easier, or harder with Sun’s involvement.

I have a lot more details, but I want to get this out there into the world, and get some feedback first.
I’d like people’s feedback. Here are 5 questions to start with.

  1. Do you think it’s a good idea?
  2. Would you attended/participate?
  3. Could you contribute in some why? What?
  4. The one thing that appeals the most on the concept?
  5. The one thing that appeals the least/lacks/needs on the concept?