MySQL Conference 2012 – The Keynotes (3)

And lastly, from none other than The Brian Aker, a keynote on The New MySQL Cloud Ecosystem. He was formerly the Director of Architecture for MySQL and also the creator of Drizzle. He is currently a fellow at HP, leading their cloud architecture group.

A little history of MySQL of course. The drivers as seen my Brian over the years: Initially “Batteries Included” or embedded into a product, to “Enterprise” or feature-creep, market-parity, stored-procedures.. And of course the GPL license, which caused no end of confusion in the marketplace. Now on to DBAs (or the shortage of!), again something we can all relate to. Yes, Pythian is also always looking for good MySQL DBAS. Continuing on however, there are no more distribution/GPL concerns as MySQL is provided as a service in the cloud now, and software as a service in the cloud does not need to concern itself with distribution.

Now on to the current landscape
“Fear” of Oracle is largely irrelevant. Definitely true, we’re over that as Oracle continues to release new, better versions of MySQL
“SQL is complete” hmm. I may need to think about that
“SQL is still in Demand” True
Disk I/O is still a problem. Of course. Especially in the cloud where it is unpredicatable
Virtualization is costly (?), Multi-tenancy issues – yes, who hasn’t seen that in the cloud!

And of course, how all this leads to what Brian is doing at HP with their version of the cloud using OpenStack, complete with demo on how to spin up and use a new MySQL instance in their cloud!

and to conclude, from my point of view, this conference seems to be quite a nostalgia trip. It seems all the angst around the various acquisitions has settled down and we can now look back on it as history while looking forward towards new paradigms that are opening up new opportunities for MySQL as well as the MySQL ecosystem, which is far bigger than just MySQL alone now. Cloud is a big buzzword, as is SaaS, PaaS, DaaS. The next few years are definitely going to be exciting as these technologies mature.