The 2009 MySQL Conference has closed it’s submissions for papers. This year the motto is “Innovation Everywhere”.

Last weekend’s Open SQL Camp in Charlottesville, Virginia, we had the chance to talk about the movements in the MySQL ecosystem. I was impressed to get the details of the Percona MySQL Patches, but focus is still in 5.0. (Welcome to the Percona team Tom Basil) Our Delta is attempting now to integrate patches into various MySQL branches. There was an opening keynote by Brian Aker from Drizzle, and Drizzle team Jay Pipes and Stewart Smith on hand. It was also announced that MySQL 5.1.30 will be GA, available in early December.

But these are not innovations that are ground breaking. Last year, it was the announcement of KickFire that I found most intriguing regarding innovation.

What is there this year?. The most interesting thing I read last week was Memcached as a L2 Cache for Innodb – The Waffle Grid Project. This is my kind of innovation. It’s sufficiently MySQL, but just adds another dimension with another companion technology. The patch seems relatively simple in concept and code size, and I’m almost prepared to fire up a few EC2’s to take this one for a spin. I’m doubly impressed because the creators are two friends and colleagues that are not hard core kernel hackers, but professionals on the front line dealing with clients daily. Will it be successful, or viable? That is the question about innovation.

Unfortunately I spend more time these days not seeing innovation in MySQL, but in other alternative database solutions in general. Projects like Clustrix, Inc., LucidDB, and Mongo in the 10gen stack.