Heating up with MySQL

Duke's Corner

A conversation with both MySQL community managers on the latest in the community and the technology

In this conversation I talk with both MySQL community managers, David Stokes from Texas and Frédéric Descamps from Belgium.

I met both of them in Brussels in February 2020 during the preFOSDEM 2020 MySQL Days. This is where the MySQL community comes together for two days of intensive technical sessions before going to the premier European open source conference — FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting). Yes, there's that much content to deal with so you need a conference before the conference!

Before the pandemic, Oracle used to send many engineers from various open source projects at the company to FOSDEM to participate in the event and to engage the other 20K developers from around the world there. And the MySQL team at Oracle was always a big part of the conference.

Now in mid 2021 tech conferences still haven't really started up again, so development and community building takes place virtually. That's where I pick up the conversation with David and Frédéric.

MySQL technology is hot these days. There is a new release out recently with many fixes and enhancements, but even before that the project released a new feature called HeatWave. That's a real-time analytics MySQL Database Service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It's easily enabled and disabled on demand with no application changes and can result in performance improvements of about 400 times. And it's only found in OCI. David and Frédéric said the early customer and developer reaction to the technology has been "staggering and eye popping." But in the conversation the guys also talked about more bits in MySQL, such as high availability, clustering, the shell, and the Kubernetes operator.

We also explored some of the dynamics going on in the MySQL community, such as the steep learning curves that all developers have to deal with these days due to the ever increasing rate of change in software development. Some of the younger developers are discovering that some of the tools and techniques that were considered "old" are coming back because, well, they just work. On the other hand, younger developers seem to tolerate better all the exclusively virtual events these days than some of the older developers. So, there are multiple simultaneous trends taking place, just as there is in any aspect of life. So Frédéric and David have a good sense of the community and hope that when live events return they can bring together the older developers with all the new developers so the community can gel again in physical experiences.

And finally, they both said that in another six months there will be some really cool technology coming out. They wouldn't say more about that. But I'd take their word on that tease, though. The last time they told me that some cool stuff was coming they released HeatWave shortly thereafter.

Video on YouTube https://youtu.be/T3TK23THWKw

David Stokes is a MySQL Community Manager in Texas. https://twitter.com/stoker

Frédéric Descamps is a MySQL community Manager in Belgium. https://twitter.com/lefred

Jim Grisanzio is a Sr. Community Manager in Oracle Developer Relations https://twitter.com/jimgris

MySQL Community https://dev.mysql.com/

Announcing July 2021 Releases featuring MySQL 8.0.26 https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/announcing-july-2021-releases-featuring-mysql-8026

HeatWave https://www.oracle.com/mysql/heatwave/

MySQL Database Service—New HeatWave Innovations https://www.oracle.com/events/live/mysql-heatwave-innovations/

Frédéric Descamps Previews Oracle Developer Live — MySQL | October 2020 https://youtu.be/6i1WreKco9E

Dave Stokes and Frederic Descamps on Contributing to the MySQL Project | June 2020 https://youtu.be/NUU4W8O3teE

preFOSDEM 2020 MySQL Days | February 2020 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwfImoydiSsuHfrVWcq8qJ_cz8o6vuoRo

Cheers Jim -- Jim Grisanzio, Sr. Community Manager, Oracle Developer Relations https://twitter.com/jimgris