Clockwise from top left: David Stokes, Jim Grisanzio, and Frédéric Descamps, July 2021

I catch up with the MySQL community as much as I can. I like engaging with interesting open source developers—especially our community managers who are so knowledgeable about the technology and current trends in the industry. In this conversation, I talk with both of our MySQL community managers, David Stokes from Texas and Frédéric Descamps from Belgium.

I first met David and Frédéric in Brussels in February 2020 during the pre-FOSDEM 2020 MySQL Days. This is where the MySQL community comes together for two days of intensive technical sessions before FOSDEM, the premier European open source conference. Yes, you need a conference before the conference—there's that much content!

Before the pandemic, Oracle used to send many engineers from various open source projects to FOSDEM to engage the other 20,000 developer attendees from around the world. Oracle’s MySQL team has always been a big part of the conference.

Tech conferences still haven't really started up again. So development and community building takes place virtually. Perhaps not surprisingly, younger developers seem better suited to these virtual events than some of the older developers. I hope that when live events return, the community can gel again by bringing together older and younger developers.

That's where I pick up the conversation with David and Frédéric. MySQL technology is hot these days. There is a new release out with many fixes and enhancements, but even before that, Oracle released HeatWave, a real-time analytics MySQL Database Service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). HeatWave is easily enabled on demand with no application changes and can deliver performance improvements of about 400X. And it's only available in OCI.

David and Frédéric said the customer reaction to the technology is "staggering." They also talked about more bits in MySQL, such as high availability, clustering, the shell, and the Kubernetes operator.

We explored some of the dynamics going on in the MySQL community, such as the increasingly steep learning curves that come with the ever-increasing rate of change in software development. Some of the younger developers are discovering that some of the tools and techniques that were considered "old" are coming back because, well, they just work.

Finally, they both said that there would be some really cool technology coming out in another six months. I'd take their word on that, by the way. The last time they told me that HeatWave was released shortly thereafter.