[UPDATE 2011/01/11] : New poll added, vote for the best GUI client tool ! (And continue to vote for other polls)
And thanks again for your involvement. It’s time to vote again… 

First of all, I wish you a happy new year.
Many things happened last year, it was really exciting to be involved in the MySQL ecosystem.
I hope this enthusiasm will be increased this year, up to you !

To start the year, I propose the MySQL+ Community Awards 2011
It will only take 5 minutes to fill out these polls.
Answer with your heart first and then with your experience with some of these tools or services.

Polls will be closed January 31, so, vote now !
For “other” answers, please,  let me a comment with details.

Don’t hesitate to submit proposal for tools or services in the comments.
And, please, share these polls !

Happy 2012 !
Cédric

This article is obviously not sponsored !
(MySQL is a trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates)

Sources :

• Oracle products, tools and services : http://www.mysql.com
• SkySQL products, tools and services : http://www.skysql.com
• Percona products, tools and services : http://www.percona.com
• FromDual products, tools and services : http://www.fromdual.com
• PalominoDB products, tools and services : http://palominodb.com/
• Pythian products, tools and services : http://www.pythian.com/
• Blue Gecko products, tools and services : http://www.bluegecko.net/
• Zabbix : http://www.zabbix.com/
• MySQL Cacti templates : http://code.google.com/p/mysql-cacti-templates/
• Nagios : http://www.nagios.org/
• r1soft CDP for MySQL : http://www.r1soft.com/linux-cdp/cdp-enterprise-edition/mysql/ 
• mylvmbackup tool : http://www.lenzg.net/mylvmbackup/
• mydumper tool : http://www.mydumper.org/
• ZRM tools : http://www.zmanda.com
• Galera replication : http://codership.com/products/galera_replication
• Tungsten replicator : http://code.google.com/p/tungsten-replicator/
• DRBD : http://www.drbd.org/
• ShoonerSQL : http://www.schoonerinfotech.com/products/schoonersql
• ScaleBase : http://www.scalebase.com/
• common-schema : http://code.google.com/p/common-schema/
• innotop : http://code.google.com/p/innotop/
• MySQL Tuner : https://launchpad.net/mysqltuner/2.0/mysqltuner-2.1-rev17
• mycheckpoint : http://code.openark.org/forge/mycheckpoint
• MariaDB : http://mariadb.org/
• TokuDB : http://www.tokutek.com/
• InfiniDB : http://infinidb.org/
• Drizzle : https://launchpad.net/drizzle
• Amazon SimpleDB : http://aws.amazon.com/fr/simpledb//180-2635771-0721067/
• mongoDB : http://www.mongodb.org/
• Cassandra : http://cassandra.apache.org/
• CouchDB : http://couchdb.apache.org/
• Tokyo Cabinet : http://fallabs.com/
• Riak : http://basho.com/
• Hadoop : http://hadoop.apache.org/
• Tarantool : http://tarantool.org/
• memcached : http://memcached.org/
• MySQL Sandbox : http://mysqlsandbox.net/
• openark kit : http://code.openark.org/forge/openark-kit
• Redis : http://redis.io/
• Ganglia : http://ganglia.sourceforge.net/
• HandlerSocket : https://github.com/ahiguti/HandlerSocket-Plugin-for-MySQL

I am certainly looking forward to this year’s event. A tremendous amount of progress has landed in GA versions of open-source databases this year. To name just a couple, there’s a new version of Postgres (9.0) with built-in replication and many more improvements; there’s MySQL 5.5 GA; there’s the HandlerSocket NoSQL interface to MySQL; Drizzle has a beta release; and the list goes on. I believe that this conference will have balanced and representative coverage of what’s really important to users. It isn’t dominated by any vendor this year; O’Reilly is running the conference independently, and the committee members represent a broad spectrum of databases themselves.

In short, I am happier than I’ve ever been about this great and unique conference. It’s definitely going to be the best year so far. Thank you O’Reilly for holding it, and thank you to all the great speakers, and thanks to all the companies who sponsor the event.

Related posts:

1. Postgres folks, consider the 2011 MySQL conference
2. O’Reilly MySQL 2011 conference CfP is open
3. I’ll be speaking at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference 2010
4. O’Reilly MySQL Conference CfP ends today
5. High Performance MySQL Second Edition Schedule

You can read Part 2 here

You can read Part 2 here

The first part of the series is Moving from MySQL to CouchDB: Part 1.

It seems obvious that given the decreasing cost of storage and computation, there's going to be a significant increase in the volume of data that organizations accumulate over the next 10 years.  But the type of data being accumulated may be different from the areas where traditional DBMSs dominated.  It's not just about transactions; it's search patterns, on-line behavior, click-thru data, events fired off by smartphones, messages over Twitter & Facebook, log data of various kinds.

If an organization can figure out a better way identify prospects, or deliver more targeted ads, or optimize pricing decisions by analyzing terrabytes of data, they'd be crazy not to. Over the long term, companies that don't develop these capabilities will be at a competitive disadvantage.

As to what the implications are from a technological perspective, that's a whole different can of worms. I'm starting to see adoption of Big Data technologies like Hadoop, HDFS, Cassandra, MongoDB, XML databases, analysis with R, Pentaho, and loads of other technologies.  And MySQL continues to play a role here as do other traditional relational databases.  Over the next few months, I'm going to dig down deeper with people using these technologies to try and discern the emerging customer patterns.

If you're in this space or using some of these technologies, let me know your thoughts. What volume of data are you dealing with?  How many nodes or servers are you using?  Are you running on a public cloud, private cloud or hybrid? What technologies did you evaluate?  What about traditional DBMSs didn't work for this scenario? 

• Wikipedia: R, Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB
• Web sites: Cran, Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB
• Companies: Pentaho, Revolution Analytics, Cloudera, CouchOne, 10Gen, NorthScale, Riptano

We aim for talks from developers of and developers using the software in question.

Aiming for some combination of: PostgreSQL, Drizzle, MySQL, XFS, ext[34], Swift (open source cloud storage, part of OpenStack), memcached, TokyoCabinet, TDB/CTDB, CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase….. and more!

Call for Papers open NOW (Until 22nd October).

I'm the boards of two companies (Pentaho, Revolution Analytics) that are starting to see a lot of customer traction around Big Data. More and more companies in media, pharma, retail and finance are doing advanced analysis, reporting, graphing, etc with massive data sets. It made me wonder what other areas of the technology stack might evolve with the trend towards Big Data.  Obviously, there's new middleware layers like Hadoop and Map Reduce, and we're also seeing the emergence of NoSQL data management layers with Cassandra, MongoDB, MemBase and others.  But what about programming languages?  

OpenGamma CEO and resident genius Kirk Wylie wrote a post recently about why he wants a new programming language.

So why don't I have this language yet? Well, partially because programming language craftsmanship is hard. I'm pretty sure I'm not good enough to do it, which is usually my default criteria for saying something is Really Hard.

But I think as well the k3wl languages coming out are coming out of language requirements of the Top 10% crowd. They're the ones good enough to actually write the languages, and they're going to write a language that makes them happy. But then you end up with Scala, and then you end up with this monstrosity, and then you make me cry. A language in which that thing is even possible will never be a candidate as a Journeyman Programming Language.

You know who's going to do it? Someone like Gosling, who set about with the needs of the journeyman programmer in Java. But the state of the art has moved on, and Java just isn't suitable anymore.

Who I would really like to do it is Anders Hejlsberg. I am a very big fan of C#-the-Language. It's just that .Net-the-Ecosystem is so Microsoft-specific and horrific it'll never catch on in the wider world, no matter what Miguel de Icaza thinks.

This got me thinking about the challenge of the current complexity in Big Data systems.  Today, you have to be near genius level to build systems on top of Cassandra, Hadoop and the like today.  These are powerful tools, but very low-level, equivalent to programming client server applications in assembly language.  When it works it's great, but the effort is significant and it's probably beyond the scope of mainstream IT organizations.  (That's one reason that Revolution's R product has appeal, but R is a specialized statistical analysis tool, not a general purpose language.)

Could the Big Data complexity be factored out somehow with a new general purpose programming language?  No doubt. Having worked with Anders on the creation of Delphi many years back, this is right up his alley.  Or maybe we already have a good starting point with Erlang, Scala and Google's Go.  Go is particularly interesting having been designed by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson of Bell Labs / Unix fame.

What's been your experience in programming Big Data systems?  What do you think's needed?  Let me know in the comments below.

• Kirk Wylie: Blog, OpenGamma
• Wikipedia: Erlang, Scala, Go, Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB
• Web sites: Erlang, Scala, Go, Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB
• Companies: Cloudera, CouchOne, 10Gen, NorthScale, Riptano