The big questions was “Where is Oracle taking MySQL.”

Edward Screven spoke to insure everyone Oracle will continue to grow the Open Source side of the company and gave several examples of the way MySQL has already been improved over the last year. Oracle has integrating the MySQL and InnoDB teams resulting in increases of up to 35 percent for MySQL databases operating with several hundred concurrent connections. Screvan stated Hot backup had been a separate product but will now be rolled in to the enterprise edition of MySQL and InnoDB will be the default engine in the next update.

Screven said “I expect that core features will end up in community edition. There will be some value-add, like monitoring or backup, that make sense in the enterprise edition.” I take this as Oracle will continue to make MySQL more marketable. To me, this insures MySQL will not be going away.

Still the code and market has been split. MariaDB and Drizzle are the two biggest splits to watch. MariaDB has been started by the Founder of MySQL (Michael “Monty” Widenius) after selling it to Sun.

MariaDB has hired many of the top core developers of the database from Sun(R), Monty Program offers world class consulting, training and engineering services, as well as per-server per-year support subscriptions which are priced quite a bit less than the comparable MySQL Enterprise(R) subscriptions: http://askmonty.org/wiki/Support

I see a market for both MySQL and MariaDB very much like RedHat and CentOS Linux. ManiaDB is a complete drop in place replacement for MySQL and will continue to be free offering support if you desire. MySQL will continue to be strong in the market place because of the backing of Oracle and the stability of their product and support.

Drizzle is said to be a fork of MySQL but there have been so many design and code changes I think it should be considered a completely new product. Drizzle has not yet formed a commercial company and continues to be a rapidly developing community project. The technology being developed in Drizzle should be watched.

Three other subjects received lots of discussion at the conference. MemCacheD, Gearman and NoSQL where on everyone’s lips.

Most of the discussion about MemCacheD revolved around how it shouldn’t be used. Lots of programmers are using MemCacheD as a work around to database issues. As expected, DBA’s feel this should be controlled. I feel MemCacheD is a good tool and we should investigate its usage.

Gearman is a generic application framework to farm out work to other machines or processes that are better suited to do the work. It allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events. Because of the nature of our business this product should be review. Gearman might make projects like scaling notification emails for the Security service simple to do.

NoSQL is a hot subject. Open Source programs like HBase and Cassandra are being used by developers for non-relational information. NoSQL servers provide distributed data stores that often did not attempt to provide ACID guarantees. NoSQL systems are like a cross between MemcacheD and MySQL Cluster. Well implemented MemCacheD and NoSQL servers require lots of hardware with network connections and memory. NoSQL nodes not provide any user interface or monitoring systems beyond backup and crash recover. Often even these must be developed by the use.

Slides and Videos of the Keynote and talks are here.
http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/public/schedule/proceedings
http://mysqlconf.blip.tv/

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