SkySQL - The Return of the Jedi

The last few weeks have been particularly quiet from me on the blogging front.  Behind the scenes things have been quite the opposite so here is a summary of things past, present and future.

Rackspace and Drizzle

If you have read my last 'Last Week in Drizzle' post you will know that Rackspace are no longer supporting Drizzle.  They have done a fantastic job so far and have decided to pass the baton to other companies.  As for the staff, they wished to redeploy us to other teams which is something I personally was not keen on.  I would rather remain within the MySQL/Drizzle sphere which I would have no longer been able to do effectively inside Rackspace any more.

Drizzle itself will go on to do great things without Rackspace, there are a number of companies that announced support for Drizzle during the O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo and Google Summer of Code is still going ahead as planned.

MySQL Conference

For me personally it was the busiest conference I have ever attended, this is mostly down to the three talks I had to give on top of booth duty, meetings and Drizzle Developer Day.  I had some fantastic feedback from people whilst there on many subjects such as Drizzle and the MySQL 5.1 Plugins Development book.  It was great to meet up with old friends and make some new ones and I hope that the conference will continue for many years to come.

SkySQL

The day after returning from the conference I started my new role as Senior Sustaining Engineer at SkySQL (very jetlagged and in hindsight I should have given myself a day or two to recover!).  In this role I not only go back into supporting customers but also developing tools around the MySQL/Drizzle sphere.  I feel very honoured to be working with the team (many of whom I am working with for a second time), they have really done a great job of capturing the traditional MySQL spirit.

One of the first things I have been working on is a new version of mydumper, once this is ready I will create a separate blog post about it.  I think it is a fantastic tool and hope that it will be able to help many users in the future.

Google Summer of Code

SkySQL have encouraged me to continue my work on Drizzle which I have also been doing.  As part of this I am a mentor for Google Summer of Code, a student called Olaf van der Spek will be working on improving the libdrizzle client API under my guidance.  Something I am very much looking forward to.

The Return of the Jedi

So, I am back in a support type role whilst also developing useful tools and patches to enhance the usability of MySQL, I will also be blogging more and getting involved in the community/ecosystem in other ways.  This is very similar to what I was doing at Sun/Oracle but for a company designed from the ground up to be much better for the staff and customers.  I am looking forward the the bright future of SkySQL.