MySQL Community Awards 2015: 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 2015 community awards were presented on April 15rd, 2015, during the community event at the Percona Live conference. The winners are:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2015

  • Daniël van Eeden
    Daniël has done great work on MySQL security and has continued to fantastically support MySQL User Group.NL. He has also logged a lot of bugs (and submitted patches), across all sorts of different MySQL products and has done a great deal to help improve the quality of MySQL.Daniël consistently provides extremely good feedback, on a wide range of features and products, from MySQL server security, through InnoDB, partitioning, and even on other products such MySQL Enterprise Backup and MySQL Enterprise Monitor. His bugs are always reported with a high quality, and many times he even includes a contribution to fix those bugs.
  • Justin Swanhart
    Justin has worked tirelessly for the past few years on some amazing projects of his own design, Shard-Query and Flexviews. Cross shard aggregation is an extremely complex thing to get right, and Shard-Query takes an interesting approach at this. Flexviews provides a materialized view framework, which is something that MySQL lacks to many people’s annoyance. Additionally Justin has also built some performance_schema related tools, reported many MySQL bugs, and has been a public speaker about MySQL in “can do” style.
  • Morgan Tocker
    In his day job, Morgan is Community Manager at Oracle. While some of his community interaction has been because of his job, he has gone far and beyond his corporate responsibilities. He is one of the most prolific writers on the MySQL Planet, he has been the most public face of MySQL, and he is always asking for feedback and showing a sincere concern for the Open Source community.For example, Morgan’s community polls on what defaults should be changed in MySQL 5.7 put some of the MySQL product decision making directly into the hands of the community. He is a key player on keeping the community and the MySQL developers at Oracle in touch with each other.

MySQL Community Awards: Application of the year 2015

Continue reading » “MySQL Community Awards 2015: the Winners”

Oracle “Technologist of the Year: Developer” Award

I am honored to receive Oracle’s Technologist of the Year: Developer award, formerly Oracle Magazine Editors’ Choice Awards.

Technologist of the Year Award is given for individuals for their technical achievements with regard to Oracle products.

As opposed to community based awards, to win this award one must be nominated by himself or his company. There are several award categories: Developer, DBA, IT Manager etc., and many nominations per category. I have been nominated by my company and am happy to have won the award in the Developer category.

Allow me to take the pleasant opportunity to make some acknowledgements. Continue reading » “Oracle “Technologist of the Year: Developer” Award”

Oracle ACE

I am honored to have been nominated for, and to have received the Oracle ACE award.

Nomination for this award is made by Oracle community members, and in this case those being Oracle employees Keith Larson and Dave Stokes. The award is given by Oracle for my involvement in the Oracle/MySQL community and for my contributions.

While open source involvement is generally done in the mere purpose of sharing knowledge and solutions, recognition plays a role in it. For the most part, one who writes blogs wants them to be read, and one who writes code wants it to be downloaded and tested, which is an elemental type of recognition, and what I aim for.

The recognition given by the Oracle ACE award makes for a wonderful complement, being given by the corporate with whose products I’m involved. It is great to get a surprising “Hey, good work” acknowledgement. Sun/MySQL told me that back in 2009, and I was caught utterly unprepared. I am still unprepared!

Thank you, the community, the people from whom I learn and benefit, anyone who ever reads my blogs, who comment, anyone who tries my code, who provides feedback, the multitude of people writing, sharing, blogging, speaking, coding, fixing, spreading, who make it such a great community.

Thank you, Oracle for this award!