Tag Archives: Oracle

New MySQL Online Training

Oracle University recently unveiled a new online training offering – the MySQL Learning Subscription.  The combination of freely-accessible and compelling paid content makes this an exciting development to me, and should prove valuable to the community and customer base alike.  This post will briefly explore this new MySQL educational resource.

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Leaving MySQL

After nearly ten years working for MySQL, I’m pursuing a new opportunity to expand into new areas of open source data infrastructure as part of the excellent Cloudera support organization.  I’ve been fortunate to work with incredibly talented, dedicated and wonderful people on relational databases, and I’m looking forward to doing the same in the Hadoop space in my new role.  Despite this transition, I intend to remain active in the MySQL community – most immediately, finishing off a handful of half-finished blog posts in the coming weeks.

My various bit roles at MySQL have given me a front-row seat as the company grew from a smaller independent company to a prominent product at Sun to part of a much larger, enterprise-focused portfolio within Oracle.  I’m incredibly proud of the progress MySQL has made over the years, in each stage – but the past 6 years under the stewardship of Oracle are particularly satisfying.  The Oracle way of doing things is well-understood, and has historically produced very successful results – for the products, the customers and the business – but it’s not for everybody.  While I certainly appreciate the motivation of those who wanted to continue an independent MySQL tradition outside of Oracle, my heroes are the committed MySQL staff who stayed to ensure MySQL flourished inside Oracle.  Thanks for all you have done – and continue to do – to ensure MySQL is strong and gets better.

Oracle isn’t perfect, and there have been mistakes made along the way, and things I still wish could change today.  It’s a big company, and MySQL is a small part of it.  But there is an incredible dedication within the MySQL team at Oracle to improve products and experiences for both community users and customers alike.  There’s also a number of legacy Oracle staff who have worked hard to position MySQL for success inside Oracle, and to help apply and adapt Oracle ways of doing things to add value for MySQL users.  Keep up the good work – I know I’m excited to see what the future holds for MySQL.

MySQL Support is Hiring!

My old team here at Oracle looking for talented, experienced MySQL experts to join the amazing MySQL Support Team.  I was lucky enough to join this great group of people over seven years ago, and while my responsibilities have shifted to other areas with the MySQL team at Oracle, I still join the team’s chat channel daily (where they’ve revoked my vowel and address me as “t*dd” to highlight my treachery in leaving the team).   I don’t know that it’s possible to find a better group of colleagues to work with than can be found in the MySQL Support Team.

The work itself is exciting – if you like solving problems, this is an incredible job.  I’m not talking about finding and quoting applicable sections of the MySQL reference manual.  I’m talking about owning customer problems like they are your own, taking the time to understand what’s really needed, and investing the (sometimes considerable) energy into finding adequate solutions for customers – whether the problem be a bug, optimizing a schema or a query, making deployment or architecture recommendations, or just pointing people to the right download for their needs.

Beyond the primary responsibility of caring for customers in need, the MySQL Support Team performs a number of other critical roles in Oracle.  They process and prioritize community-reported bugs, they wrote many of the questions on the updated MySQL 5.6 certification exams, they evaluate development releases and provide early feedback on pre-GA software, they share their knowledge at conferences, they contribute code patches, they write features that meet customer needs, they participate in product planning teams.  If you want to have a meaningful, lasting influence on MySQL products and community, this is a great opportunity.

The team is particularly looking for candidates in Japan, Russia, India, China, Mexico, Portugal or the U.S., but would love to see resumes of qualified individuals elsewhere.  If you’re interested, please let me know via the private contact form below:

Learn From MySQL Support Staff at MySQL Connect!

Members of the MySQL Support Team wear a number of different hats here at Oracle.  Obviously, our top priority is to provide amazing technical support that makes customers rave.  We also have a team dedicated to processing bug reports from the MySQL Community.  Some of us are active bloggers or assist on mailing lists or forums, while others find other ways to contribute to the MySQL Community.  We help out with QA and product planning, write books, and the consultative support aspects of MySQL subscriptions allow us the opportunity to help train and advise customers on best practices and successful MySQL-backed application architecture.  In short, we’re deeply invested in making sure that MySQL deployments are successful.

This year, we’re privileged to send some of these great MySQL experts to the inaugural MySQL Connect Conference this September 29-30, and it will be a great opportunity for you to experience first-hand the value that MySQL Support can provide:

Be sure to stop by the MySQL Support booth in the demo grounds at MySQL Connect and meet these MySQL experts – they’ll be happy to help you solve any of your tricky MySQL problems.

If you’re an Oracle DBA just getting started on MySQL, it’s worth the $100 fee to add MySQL Connect to your OOW registration, but Ben Krug will also be leading a session at OOW with the goal of Demystifying MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers.

And if California is just too far to travel, perhaps you can catch Uma Bhat‘s presentation at PyCon India, Introduction to MySQL Connector/Python.

We hope to see you at one of these upcoming conferences!