Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Mapping the MySQL community

I was intrigued by this survey about MySQL today, and I took it.
Some of the questions made me think about the status of MySQL community. Unlike other free/open source projects, MySQL community people are not direct contributors to the project, but just users. Then there are the more advanced ones who keep an active role, and the majority who are just content to use it and don't even care to participate in blogs or forums.
Seen throrugh the articles in PlanetMySQL, the MySQL community has three components, with sub components:
  • Sun/MySQL employees, who link between the noisy users and the company.
    • The ones who produce or advocate closed source
    • The ones who only deal with open source
    • The ones who tell interesting stories without taking sides.
  • The interested parties, i.e. the ones who have gained some expertise in MySQL and sell their services or products.
    • The positive vibes, who promote their business and contribute constructive criticism
    • The negative vibes, who are always complaining about something, trying to weakening MySQL in order to sell their stuff, even when they contribute good technical stuff.
  • The enthusiasts, who just write about cool things.

Maybe the distinction is wider, but this is how I see it after browsing planetmysql archives for a while.
I like to collocate myself in the third group. And I am thinking of taking a few notes and write a Whos' who of MySQL community when I have time.

Sunday, June 1, 2008

MySQL sought by politics

In the hot US political campaign, something of interest for MySQL is happening. The Obama camp is looking for developers in the LAMP stack, asking for MySQL experience. They also ask specifically for deep knowledge of MySQL performance and query optimization. The interesting bits about this request is that it is
It would be interesting to know what the McCain camp is going to use to counter this move. But it is not going to be so difficult to guess ...
$ wget -O /dev/null -S http://www.johnmccain.com/
...
Content-Location: http://www.johnmccain.com/Home.htm
Last-Modified: Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:39:58 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
...

I can already foresee many geeks converting a political debate into a technological challenge.
As, for me, I don't discuss my political views. Go LAMP!