MySQL

Ego Battle-Royale in Conference Wednesday Keynote Block

Here is a quick heads up for those following along in the buzz-meter generated about the MySQL Conference and Expo in a couple weeks: the development team responsible for Yahoo! Pipes — the incredible web-based GUI for mashing mashups — will be doing the conference’s closing keynote… more details to come!

Anyway, I wanted to follow up on Kaj’s blog post about the “Clash of the DB Egos” scheduled for Wednesday morning, directly following Eben’s “Freedom Businesses Protect Privacy” keynote talk. In Kaj’s original post, he joked that E.F. Codd and C.J. Date would be amongst the database egos participating in the keynote… I say joke because E.F. Codd passed away a number of years ago, and Chris Date seemed like an impossibility to grab to do the keynote.

Well, it turns out that I was actually able to speak with Chris about coming to keynote at the conference, but due to a scheduling conflict, it wasn’t going to happen. He did offer to talk about next year, though, which certainly would be thrilling…

Anyway, enough about Chris and Edgar.

Who actually will be participating in this epic battle of ego, brainpower, and uh, not-so-Sumo strength? Well, the wizards of MySQL, of course, along with two of the top minds from NitroSecurity and Solid Technologies.

NitroSecurity and Solid Technologies are two of MySQL’s partners in the storage engine space. SolidDB and NitroEDB are storage engines from the respective companies that epitomize what the pluggable storage engine architecture is all about: flexibility to meet different storage needs with niche engines designed for specific purposes. Monty Widenius, co-founder of MySQL and one of the original authors of our beloved database will join Jim Starkey and Mikael Ronström.

Monty probably needs no introduction. He’s the outspoken Swede known for visiting the birds of a feather sessions at the MySQL conference replete with Swedish vodka chocolates. He’s also the mind behind much of the MySQL code infrastructure. Jim Starkey also likely needs no introduction. Father of the BLOB, Interbase, Firebird, and most recently, Netfrastructure, Jim is now working full time on the new Falcon storage engine, due out later this year. Mikael Ronström is one of the creators of the NDB Cluster, which was conceived during his tenure at Ericsson. All three have made a profound impact on the database systems world, and all three have unique and differing perspectives on the future of RDBMS and the future of MySQL’s internal architecture.

From Solid, Ari Valtanen, co-founder and CTO of Solid, will join the aforementioned MySQLers and Paul Whittington, co-founder and Chief Architect at NitroSecurity. They will provide a unique perspective on their own development methodologies, strategies, and roadmaps in relation to the pluggable storage engine architecture. This keynote promises to deliver some of the most interesting discussion on what exactly it means to even be a database system in these post-legacy days, and how MySQL has evolved and will continue to evolve in the future.