Bringing fresh blood to the MySQL Council

The MySQL Council has been operational for more than one year, with mixed fortunes. As an early member, I am glad to be a member, and I feel that I have done something useful by participating in this organism. The council is young, and the MySQL community is variegated and sparse. The enthusiasm of the first volunteers must be reinforced by the injection of new members, who can contribute fresh views and keep the council on their toes. I am glad to see more names coming up, and, as some of my fellow council members, I volunteered to serve for another year. But this doesn't need to be my decision. I will stay unless we get feedback on the contrary, and the same will be for the other people in the list below. ⁽¹⁾ Please use the feedback form to voice your ideas and suggestions about the new council. Anything goes: who should be or not be there, what you would like the council to do, and how the next council should be created.

First Name	Last Name	Title	Company	Country
Alexandre	Almeida	CTO	HTI Tecnologia	Brazil
Sheeri	Cabral	DBA/Architect	Mozilla	United States
Laine	Campbell	Principal and CEO	PalominoDB	United States
Patrick	Galbraith	Senior Engineer Cloud Data Services	Hewlett Packard	United States
Bradley	Kuszmaul	Chief Architect	Tokutek	United States
Giuseppe	Maxia	Director of Quality Assurance	Continuent	Italy
Sarah	Novotny	CIO	Meteor Entertainment	United States
Marco	Tusa	Cluster Technical Leader	Pythian	Canada
Daniel	van Eeden	Consultant	Snow B.V.	Netherlands

The deadline for feedback is March 23, 2012. Let your voice be heard!

⁽¹⁾ Just for the record: all the people in this list have volunteered, in answer to a public call for candidates.

Make your voice heard. Tell Oracle and the MySQL Council what bugs you

The MySQL Council has not being idle. We have addressed the bugs database concerns, and we are continuing our dialog.
To do a better job, we would like to hear more from the community. Unlike other established user groups, MySQL does not have a world wide organization for its users. The council exists on a voluntary basis, and we are seeking support from the rest of you. Please let your voice heard. There are three main channels for this:

• A MySQL Council survey
• A set of questions that will be answered during the keynote at the MySQL Conference
• Talk to a council member

Survey

The MySQL Council survey is an attempt to collect, understand, and eventually prioritize what the MySQL community feels, and act on their suggestions. It is a very short survey. We don't want your opinion on everything from barbecue sauce recipes to brain surgery. We need only a few lines about what bothers you the most with MySQL and how we can help. And of course, if you wamt to help, we really want to hear about that.

Questions for the keynote

Let's ask Oracle directly. What are the biggest issues that you have? You can submit your questions for the keynote, and Tomas Ulin will answer them on stage at the MySQL conference
Here is your shot at practicing people power: think of the most pressing questions that you would see Tomas Ulin addressing, and submit them as soon as possible.

Talk to a council member

Council members are all well known people in the community. Most of us will be at the MySQL Conference or at Collaborate 11, or both.
If you want to ask me questions about the council, or MySQL, or community matters, I will do my best to answer them, or to seek an answer if I don't know it myself.

I will be at the San Francisco MySQL User Group on April 7th.
Then I will be at the MySQL conference Monday and Tuesday. Oh, and there is the Community Dinner West on Monday evening!
On Wednesday, I will be at Collaborate 11.
The other council members will be around as well. If you don't feel like filling the survey and prefer person-to-person communication, come see us, and let's talk!

The MySQL Council addresses the public bug database issue

When I announced the MySQL Council, I said that among its roles there is that of being a bridge between the MySQL community and Oracle.
It has come the time where we put this role to good use. Recently, there have been some concerns about the MySQL bugs database, which could be summarized in Mark Callaghan's post Where have the bugs gone?.
The gist of the concerns is that there has been a change in the bugs handling, although we don't know what was changed and how. In short, there has been a total lack of communication. The MySQL Council has addressed the concerns about the public bug database in a recent meeting, and has taken several steps, like approaching Oracle directly, and releasing a summary of the concerns in its site.

The MySQL Council members have been discussing the decision by Oracle, to reduce the importance of the public MySQL bug database for providing input and direction of product updates and direction. The Council would also like to work with Oracle to promote communication around the status of the database access to the broader community so members will understand what to expect moving forward.

Without communication around the use and changes relating to the public bug database, there have been concerns in the community raised about duplicate bug tracking, bug numbers in commits not being visible to the public, difficulty in offering patches into the MySQL server, and the generalized decreased transparency in the evolution and remediation of the MySQL server and associated products.

The IOUG (Independent Oracle User Group) is supporting the MySQL Council in its efforts to raise questions and query direction from Oracle. The MySQL Council will be meeting with Oracle stakeholders to discuss options for keeping appropriate portions of the database active as well as communicating status and future actions to the broader community.

We don't know the outcome yet. But we'll surely post an update as soon as we hear it.

The MySQL Council is up and running. We want to hear from you!

The Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) has formed the MySQL Council, with the purpose of addressing the interests and needs of MySQL users.

The current Council members are:

• Sarah Novotny, Blue Gecko, Council Chair
• Sheeri Cabral, PalominoDB
• Bradley Kuszmaul, Tokutek
• Giuseppe Maxia, Continuent
• Rob Wultsch, GoDaddy.com
• Matt Yonkovit, Percona

The IOUG is a well established and respected institution, with more than 20,000 database professionals registered as its members. In the long history of Oracle, the IOUG has always played a role in the aftermath of many acquisitions, extending a friendly hand to the newcomers in the family. I have spent much time with IOUG people, and I was impressed by their enthusiasm and professionalism. My impression of the IOUG is that it is a friendly group of people with the common goal of improving the experience of being an Oracle user.
The IOUG is not looking for assimilation. While Oracle business strategy calls for full integration, the IOUG recognizes that users come in different sizes and shapes, and they cannot be forced into the institution. Instead, the IOUG want to understand the newcomers and offer their services to help out towards the common goals. The IOUG people also know that many old Oracle users are also MySQL users. By facilitating the integration of the MySQL community they are serving the needs of a wider population than the traditional set of MySQL users.

The MySQL community has never been organized as a whole. There id nothing comparable to the massive presence of the Oracle user group. MySQL users are mostly isolated. When they convene into social entities, they identify themselves either by town boundaries or by being member of some group that has some interest in MySQL (Linux distributions, PHP developers, CMS framework users). There is no unified view of what users represent or want, and a difficult dialog between the user base and the company that produces the software.
With Oracle, this lack of unity is yet another obstacle in the path to a good understanding. Oracle is used to talk to a large entity representing its users, and it has not the patience or the skills to deal with such a distributed presence as the MySQL community. For this reason I believe that the MySQL Council is a good idea. It provides a tool for the will of the MySQL community to be conveyed to the company, using the IOUG, one of the channels that are familiar to Oracle, and that are more likely to reach the decision makers.

The main goal of the council should be to mend fences. There is much to be done. The culture of traditional Oracle users and that of MySQL users are different and sometimes hard to reconcile. Oracle strategies that were tuned towards pleasing their traditional customers may not suit the needs of the newcomers. All this needs to be addressed, and the MySQL Council could be the first step to the solution.

For this reason, the council members want to hear from the community. What are the main pain points and issues that you want addressed? What is Oracle doing right with MySQL? Where could it improve?

If you know one or more of us, please contact us by email. Or write a blog post about the issues to address. Or comment in our blogs. We want to hear from you. We feel that we must represent the larger MySQL community and bridge the gaps between the company and the user base.

The roles of the MySQL Council is not only to be a diplomatic channel of communication between users and company. It will also help with the diffusion of MySQL culture among Oracle users, with articles, conferences, meetings, and whatever the imagination provides to achieve the goal of spreading the word.

Also for this goal we welcome your input. Make your voice heard. It's time to boost the technical writing in Planet MySQL and in the rest of the net. Let MySQL be known!