Innovation in Latvia

Last week we had a meeting of all of our developers in Riga, Latvia. Since the development teams of MySQL are so distributed (30 countries, last time I checked) we try to get together for several face to face meetings each year. Most of these are small team meetings, but once a year, we gather all the teams together. And for about a week, we work like a normal company. Ok, maybe normal is the wrong word. Perhaps “co-located team” is more accurate.

This year we had all our developers plus managers, our community team, and key engineers from support, consulting, system engineering, product management, Sun’s performance engineering team, along with a few customers and community contributors. It was also nice that David and Monty, the founders of MySQL were there as was Jim Starkey, of Falcon fame, Paul McCullagh from PBXT, Bob Brewin one of Sun’s Software CTOs, Mark Callaghan from Google and Rich Green who runs the whole software Business at Sun among others.

Admittedly, our development meetings are not completely open events like our users conference or various un-conferences. It’s more of an opportunity for us to get our own internal operations in order, make sure teams are working together and making the right decisions. As Marten Mickos commented to the group, things inside the sausage factory can be quite chaotic even if the end results are excellent.

I’ve participated in these meetings for a number of years and it’s interesting to see how we have managed to scale. In the early days, there was a bit of a cliche at MySQL where anything was possible if we just had “two more developers.” Now that we’re larger and have more resources from Sun, I hear this less often. Most teams are now large enough that they can make their own trade-offs on what is important for their users. (And by users, I mean both our non-paying users and our paying customers. Both groups are equally important to our success.) We’ve also matured as an organization, especially with strong technical managers who have joined our ranks in the last year. Historically, that was always a challenge for us and one of the factors that limited our own internal scalability.

That’s not to say that everything is perfect. We have many issues that we still need to tackle, including ensuring that all products work well together, getting faster at incorporating contributions from the community, ensuring we scale well on large multi-core systems, and generally being more open and transparent in what we’re doing.

One of the best things about our developer meetings is it has also become a showcase for many areas of innovation. We have a couple of afternoon sessions where developers can show off cool things they are working on and get feedback from others. This included innovations in the server, our tools, even our documentation. Some of these will become available in the next few months, some likely in 2009. But it was great to see so many different things such as:

–MySQL Workbench alpha version on Linux (and soon Mac, Solaris)

-A prototype of a long discussed performance interface

-MySQL Cluster encrypted online backup as well as online node scalability (demo’d very dramatically with cool music from old school C64 games!)

-Multi-threaded Cluster and Alter Table operations

-New Cluster management capabilities and NDBINFO as well as Cluster running on Windows

-New Query Analysis and graphing in MySQL Enterprise Monitor

-Preview of a new connector for OpenOffice.org

-New ways to browse documentation sorted by topic and with integrated user comments

-A community-based project around MyLVMBackup

-Foreign keys implemented in a storage engine independent fashion

-Faster performance of the forthcoming MySQL backup and restore

-Improved deadlock detection in Falcon and Maria storage engines

-Semi-synchronous replication

-Replication with memcached

-Replication Bin Log decoder

-SQL Parsing using the ANTLR parser generator

No doubt some of these items are long overdue, but I was still very pleased to see all of the progress. And for those who think there’s nothing to do in Latvia let me just say the beer is great, there was a lot of enthusiasm for Software Freedom Day and Queen + Paul Rodgers were excellent.

For those interested, here are some photos Lenz Grimmer has published.