I wanted to follow up my earlier post My Ideas for MySQL Camp III with some of motivations. Luckily, good friend and colleague Jeremy literally took all of 15 mins to respond to my post with “So, I see your vision for the event itself. What’s your vision for the results of the event?” (Unfortunately with 150+ draft posts, it’s taken some time to complete my reply).

The present differentiation of MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise in my eyes is a joke. Now before I start or re-start more then already one flame war let me first talk about MySQL Enterprise. MySQL Enterprise is a great and necessary product offering by MySQL Inc. It serves essential services to essential customers with features such as commercial 24×7 support, MySQL Enterprise Monitor which is an excellent start when clients have nothing (and boy I’ve seen more then my share of these), monthly updates and certified binaries.

My gripe is not with MySQL Enterprise, but with little to nothing that MySQL has done with MySQL Community. Take these simple facts.

MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise were split at 5.0.27 in October 2006.
Only one contribution was added to the Community side, SHOW PROFILE in 5.0.37. What was to be a start of hopefully more creative contributions, suddenly stopped and has not changed since. My only thought could be, heaven forbid you now change the scope of functionality in 5.0 between Community and Enterprise, but wasn’t that the point?

Ok, new features change the scope of the base feature set. New features may make the product more unstable. Community people get this. The present release cycle process with the differentiation is a joke. You can’t add any features to 5.0, you can’t add any to 5.1 for like the past year. I’d go so far as to say, ZERO community contributions submitted even now would make 6.0. We don’t want to draw from sales and marketing features of Falcon and Online Backup.

MySQL Community is an essential product, it’s the only choice when MySQL Enterprise is not an option.

So to answer Jeremy’s question. What’s your vision for the results of the event?

1. To personally gain a better in-depth process of understanding the MySQL code, debugging, enhancing and contributing to MySQL
2. To see others gain the same skills, knowledge and appreciation.
3. To see better documentation of the process (A goal of the MySQL Community team)
4. To see the length and breath of creative input increase
5. To ignite some urgency and pressure to actually see MySQL Community differentiate to the benefit of the community.
6. To simply have fun, hack code and enjoy it with others

Since drafting this response some time ago, Sun has acquired MySQL, MySQL 5.1 still remains in RC, and we now have a beta of Falcon in an alpha of 6.0 (which I don’t get). With the MySQL Conference happening in a few weeks, I’ll be keen to know what’s going to happen with the MySQL Community differentiation and whether any information will indeed be forthcoming.

I plan to revisit this topic in the next 3 to 6 months to see if anything has actually changed as a result of Sun. We will just have to wait patiently.