What I think is interesting is presentations about the problems in MySQL and how they can be corrected or worked around. The MySQL community finds a lot of problems in MySQL and they also fix a lot of these problems. That’s interesting to me, “MySQL empowers mission critical financial system” is not.

http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2009/02/06/towards-more-diversity-of-speakers-at-mysql-conference-and-expo/

BTW, if “works for a company trying to make money from MySQL” is the criterion, you shouldn’t regard Sheeri, Ronald Bradford etc as community members. They are exactly the same as Percona employees in that regard.

like Mark I was part of the reviewers.

I can confirm that a number (but certainly not all) of the Percona talks received good grades. I personally expected about 2 to 4 of their talks to be scheduled.

I do not know how any detail regarding the selection process after the grading process so I can only guess.

HTH,

Roland

But my main point is, before making the final selection, someone should have made some decisions to override the fair selection process *in favor* of percona and possibly some others that Mark mentions. If nothing else, it should have been done because not accepting a single talk from these independent consultants will look odd, regardless of whether it happened through no evil deeds on Sun’s behalf. At the same time, the balance between some other topics could have been corrected too (less memcahced, just to name a simple example, no personal hatred intended :-)

Sometimes the pure dynamics of election rules may have imperfect effects, we can only look at the recent history of some bi-partisan nations here:-)

But, like I said, better late than never :-)

Anyone blaming Percona should understand what happened. Most of us, including myself, will never know.

I reviewed proposals but did not select them. Reviewers grade the proposals, but MySQL selects them. Some of their proposals received decent scores. They could have been improved with feedback, but that was not done. After it became clear that Percona had no talks, I asked people on the inside why this happened. That email received no response.

I give huge credit to whoever at Sun/MySQL turned the boat.

So even if it may have been fully unintentional, at some point someone should have looked at the big picture and corrected these imbalances (and I do mean specifically the memcached stuff :-), overriding the voting results (or redoing them) if needed.

FWIW, I understand that “correcting” these mistakes came much by initiative from our management. To me it shows that we may make mistakes, but we are not stupid or petty enough not to be able to correct them too. That’s kind of comforting.

(Ok so there are still other people left out. Get over it, my talk wasn’t accepted either – of course, I go there for free anyway. But for sure this year if not before, there are more mysql consultants and experts than what can fit into one conference. One way or another, not everyone can be a speaker anymore.)

Personally I’ve always thrived in a competitive situation. It usually
increases the value of the community since more innovation is
required to stay ahead of your competitor and this increases the
value of the MySQL community and enables us to increase the
impact of MySQL in the IT world. The great thing about open source
is that you will have to share your results with the community so
even though you’re competing for business there will always be
cooperation on the development of the source code.

My personal trait on behaving as a good community member in
this situation is to focus on displaying your own positive
characteristics and showing what you’ve done to innovate.
Comparisons to other happens through benchmarks of various
sorts, both company-specific and open source benchmarks and
standard benchmarks.

Lastly I would like to give special credit to the work done by
Mark Callaghan and his team at Google. I’ve had the
opportunity to play around with their patches and really found
them to be easy to understand and really stable. So if I had
an award to give out on the MySQL Community Contribution
of the year I’d certainly give it to them. Disclaimer: I don’t have
such an award to give out :)

So finally much looking forward to meeting at the MySQL Users
Conference week and seeing what everyone is up to and
sharing our ideas.

Probably not everyone knows how valuable it is, and providing great abstracts is like providing good CV, nobody is able to reject them then :)

We are not banned from “Velocity” conference as we were from “MySQL C&E”, so we will take part there.