MySQL Conference 2007 1.1: the Keynotes

I got an early start to the day today. I still don’t have a rehearsal schedule for my presentation, so I may have to miss lunch to get the opportunity to test out my slides (which will be posted on this blog, by the way). But thats a minor irritant – I do have them in PDF, so worst-case I’ll just use the computer/projector set-up provided by the a/v crew.

The keynotes started with MÃ¥rten Mickos, the CEO of MySQL AB giving us a “State of MySQL” address. Keeping all the people together in a company where 70% of the employees work from home and are distributed across hundreds of cities across the world is no easy task, and I have a lot of respect for him.

The roadmap for MySQL looks very interesting, with 5.1 expected to be stable by the end of the year, and 6.0 coming out next year with a whole bunch of neat features, including real online backups, a whole bunch of new transactional engines including the new Falcon engine, and way more metrics/profiling — things that I sorely miss when working on MySQL which we just take for granted on Oracle. I will go out on a limb here and say that 2008 will be the year of MySQL — watch for a lot of things to come from this “little database that could.”

Guy Kawasaki with “The Art of Innovation” was next. There are no words to describe his keynote, you just need to hear him — funny, witty, motivational, inspirational all in one. Check out his blog at https://blog.guykawasaki.com

One of the things Guy said was that if you make something and find your target market isn’t buying, but someone else is, you need to go to the people who are buying and ask them what else can you do to make them buy more, rather than reworking it to try and get your target market to buy it. And as I’m sitting here listening to Michael Evans talk about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, I just want to have one. Even if I have to pay $500 for it. It’s just so neat and tightly integrated, consumes very little power, and is very well built. Oh, and it runs Linux! (This blog post comes to you via an HP DV6110 running Fedora Core 6. I just don’t find I can be productive under Windows anymore.)

There has been talk about an arrangement where people could pay for two laptops, and they would get just one, the other being donated to a developing country. I’d go for it, but there’s no confirmation on that yet.

Now on to the sessions after a break.

Thanks for following along with me!

–Raj.