MySQL Community Awards 2014: the Winners

The MySQL Community Awards initiative is an effort to acknowledge and thank individuals and corporates for their contributions to the MySQL ecosystem. It is a from-the-community, by-the-community and for-the-community effort. The committee is composed of an independent group of community members of different orientation and opinion, themselves past winners or known contributors to the community.

The 2014 community awards were presented on April 3rd, 2014, during the community event at the Percona Live conference. The winners are:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2014

• Colin Charles
  Colin’s list of service to the MySQL Community goes back almost 10 years. He was a community engineer starting in 2005, chaired some of the O’Reilly MySQL conferences, ran the MySQL projects for Google Summer of Code. As a partner and Chief Evangelist for Monty program, he continues to promote and grow the MySQL ecosystem. Though it’s his job, he goes above and beyond, driven by his passion for open source and MySQL.
• Frédéric Descamps
  Frederic organizes the MySQL & Friends Devroom at FOSDEM every year. He worked towards making a true community driven event participated by all key players. in 2014 the MySQL & Friends devroom also presented a shared booth/stand regrouping Oracle, MariaDB/SkySQL and Percona engineers and developers.
• Geoffrey Anderson
  Geoffrey is organizor & moderator at DBHangops: a bi-weekly community hangout discussing all things MySQL. The hangouts are free to join, and are streamed live and stored for later playback via YouTube.
  Geoffrey works to provide with content, and leads the hangouts with good spirit. DBHangOps makes for a good knowledge sharing media.

MySQL Community Awards: Application of the year 2014

• Galera
  Galera provides MySQL with synchronous replication, offering a long time sought for High Availability solution for MySQL. It is fast becoming one of the main product/technology everyone is building next-gen businesses around. It is an important part of the renaissance of what’s next for the “ecosystem”.
• Random Query Generator
  Random Query Generator has found hundreds of problems with its random generation of queries, because often the most serious bugs are outside of developers’ expectations and their test cases. Engineers who work on MySQL and its derivatives have been able to vastly improve the quality of the database because of it. Random Query Generator has positively effected every single user in the MySQL ecosystem, mostly without them even knowing it.
  RQG was originally created by Philip Stoev, and has attracted further contributors over the years.

MySQL Community Awards: Corporate Contributor of the year 2014

• Oracle
  Oracle has continued to show its commitment to MySQL with the 5.6 release and work in progress on 5.7. MySQL 5.6 might be the best release ever with significant improvements for InnoDB and replication (performance, GTIDs, parallel apply) including significant changes from the community. The 5.7 release has equally high goals for making replication better (enhanced semi-sync) and making InnoDB faster on big multi-core servers. We also appreciate the continued involvement, excellence and passion of the support and community teams.
• BinLogic
  BinLogic has been a great steward of the MySQL Community in one of the fastest growing technology hubs, Latin America. BinLogic created the MySQL, NoSQL and Cloud Solutions day in 2012 and repeated the event in 2013, drawing in notable speakers from the community.

Congrats to all winners!

Committee members are:

• Baron Schwartz
• Domas Mituzas
• Gerry Narvaja
• Giuseppe Maxia
• Jeremy Cole
• Justin Swanhart
• Marc Delisle
• Mark Leith
• Ronald Bradford
• Sarah Novotny
• Sheeri K. Cabral
• Tim Callaghan
• Mark Callaghan (co-secretary)
• Shlomi Noach (co-secretary)

We also wish to recognize and thank Henrik Ingo for initiating and promoting this process throughout the past years.

[UPDATE] To elaborate, the community awards pre-date back to 2005, where awards were given by MySQL AB, and later Sun Microsystems. Arjen Lentz, Jay Pipes, Colin Charles, Giuseppe Maxia and Lenz Grimmer are all past organizers of the community awards.