What’s five years between friends?

I am by now a few days late, but I meant to point out once the milestone had been reached:

MySQL Bug #11660, “Expose either SQLState, mysql_error() or other diagnostics in stored procedures” was opened on June 30, 2005. It has now been open for more than five years with no fix in the server, no fix in sight, and no real workaround. This makes it very difficult to recommend the use of MySQL stored procedures for most serious applications, as it is somewhere between very cumbersome and impossible to handle errors properly. How can something so important go so long without a fix?

On “open core” versus Open Source

It seems like everyone in the MySQL community has been chiming in on the so-called “open core” versus Open Source debate. It seems like at least one potential opinion has been unsaid so far, and it’s the one I share: It doesn’t matter if you’re closed source, “open core”, or Open Source, as long as you are completely honest with your customers and/or your users about which of those you are, and that you communicate any changes, particularly in a more closed direction.

I think this is the problem that MySQL (regardless of owners) have suffered in the past — they faced pressure to make money (which is fine), and they decided to used closed source approaches to do so (which is fine), and they picked some features, which they’d promised their users for a long time, to do it with (which is fine, although arguably not that nice), and they failed to communicate it well to either users or customers (which is tragic). The end result is, as could be expected, a bad taste in both users’ and customers’ (and in many cases, even employees’) mouths. In addition to this failure to communicate, they’ve also fallen over pretty terribly when others attempt to do the communication for them, as demonstrated when they made the decision (as far as I know, overturned) two years ago to offer some features only on the Enterprise side of the Community-Enterprise split. If you’re being completely honest and open with your communications to your customers and users, a post like mine should spark a “so what, we already heard that” instead of a huge storm of debate.

From my perspective, MySQL has never been “true” Open Source, as the documentation (which I helped to write a large part of as an early employee of MySQL) is not free, and never has been.

All of this is just fine, but don’t be surprised when the public is critical of you, and isn’t clamoring for the mountain tops to sing your “open source” praises.

An offer to sponsor your MySQL Meetup

If you participate at all in the MySQL Meetup circuit, by now it’s likely you’ve heard that the agreement currently in place between Meetup.com and MySQL/Sun is expiring quite soon. Because of that, MySQL Meetups which used to be free for organizers are reverting to paid status very soon (costing the organizer at least $12 per month). MySQL Meetup organizers (like myself) have received an email from Meetup.com giving them 7 days warning. MySQL/Sun have suggested that all MySQL Meetups move to Facebook.

I don’t know all of the details of MySQL and Meetup.com’s prior arrangement for this sponsorship, but from what I gather it did not involve MySQL paying $12 per month for each Meetup—I suspect it was a free/barter agreement. I specifically don’t know Meetup.com’s side of the story; but it doesn’t matter. I feel that Meetup.com has always provided a useful, functional, and fairly priced service. It was nice that it used to be free for MySQL Meetups, but nonetheless it’s a service I’m willing to pay for (and I did, for a few months, before I found out that they could be free).

In fact, I’m willing to do more. I think, given the pittance of a cost involved, it is entirely unnecessarily disruptive to the MySQL community to expect all MySQL Meetups to move to a new service… and I’m going to continue to use Meetup.com for the Silicon Valley MySQL Meetup. Furthermore, I am willing to personally sponsor about 10 other MySQL Meetups around the world.

So, to that end: If you are a MySQL Meetup organizer, and you would prefer to continue using Meetup.com to organize your meetings, please contact me. We can work out the details, and I will pay for a handful of you. Please send me at least the URL to your Meetup, so I can check it out. I’m looking to sponsor interesting and active Meetups, not necessarily idle Meetups that have never actually had a meeting. However, you can be anywhere in the world, and you don’t have to be a particularly large group.

I have been discussing this offer (before publication) with Peter Zaitsev of Percona, and he is willing to sponsor a few MySQL Meetups as well.

Thanks, and have fun meeting up!

Skipping the MySQL Conference and Expo 2009

I have been silent on the topic of this year’s MySQL conference, and really, silent in nearly all ways anyway. Today, as the MySQL ~~Users Conference~~ Conference and Expo 2009 starts up, some people will be wondering where I am, so I ought to at least answer that: I am skipping the conference this year.

As my wife can tell you, this is not a decision I’ve taken lightly, and I’ve gone back and forth on it for months and then down to the final days leading up to now. I’ve decided after much internal and external debate just to skip it all this year, including the side conferences and other stuff. Why? The reasons are basically:

It’s my opinion that the “state of the art” with MySQL has not changed, so I am not really missing much technical content to further myself. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on with Percona and Google’s work, but I largely follow that through blogs and mailing lists and personal contacts already.
I strongly disagree with the speaker selection process used in this and the previous couple of years’ conferences. I feel that they actively discourage any speakers who refuse to stay on script—those willing to tell users the reality of the situation. I can’t and/or won’t do that, so I didn’t submit anything this year—my initial effort, months ago, to disengage from the conference. I watched from the sidelines this year and listened to everyone else’s complaints about not being selected. I don’t care to hear about the process, the details, the counter-arguments, etc., but really, any selection process which ends up leaving out Percona, for any reason, is just broken. I know they got some consolation slots in the end, but that doesn’t change my opinion.
The previous years’ conferences, while they have been fun in various ways, have been declining in actual technical content and increasing in politics, marketing hype, PR stuff, and whatnot. This does not have value to me (see above).
I am tired of explaining MySQL Enterprise vs. MySQL Community, InnoDB/Oracle vs. MySQL Inc., where the patches have gone, why the foreign key implementation in MySQL sucks, why the triggers implementation sucks, the problems with replication, etc., ad infinitum. Nothing has changed, it’s all basically as broken as it was last year, the year before that, etc.

OK, many people know the above about me already. So why not go to the Percona Performance Conference or hang out and chat with people, or…

The most important reason: I am making a concerted effort to stay out of the politics of the whole conference this year. While I feel that I add nominally value to the conference by analyzing and reporting on the happenings, and asking uncomfortable questions, I just can’t do it this year. I need a break.

I debated potentially taking this entire week as vacation and really disappearing for the entire week, disconnected, but I really value the friendship of all of my friends that come out to California from the far reaches of the Earth for the conference. I will be in the Bay Area (as usual every week), and I would very much enjoy having a politics-free drama-free dinner if you’re up for it. Contact me!

Administrative Note: I have disabled comments on this entry, as I don’t want the debate and politics to shift over here. I apologize in advance for my anti-blog-like behavior in that regard. I welcome any and all notes and comments at jeremy@jcole.us.