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

• sys schema
  As PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA matured in the MySQL ecosystem, Mark Leith identified the need to condense its information around user-friendliness and visibility.  Out of this, the ps_helper and eventually MySQL SYS projects were born. This actively-developed, one-man project has become a standard integration in the MySQL distribution today.

• VividCortex
  VividCortex brings fresh and challenging ideas to the monitoring space, originally targeting MySQL. It provides near realtime information that was previously deemed unattainable through aggressive sampling and original statistical formulas that is raising the bar for monitoring high performance data stores at scale.

MySQL Community Awards: Corporate Contributor of the year 2015

• WebScaleSQL Contributors: Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Alibaba
  It’s a common misconception, but WebScaleSQL is not a competitor to MySQL – it is strongly rooted in Oracle’s MySQL and closely follows its “upstream” MySQL codebase. Instead, it is intended as a place for several companies that were already collaborating on scalability improvements in MySQL to do so in a quicker and more succinct manner.

Congrats to all winners!

Committee members are:

• Baron Schwartz
• Colin Charles
• Frederic Descamps
• Geoffrey Anderson
• Giuseppe Maxia
• Marc Delisle
• Mark Leith
• Philip Stoev
• Ronald Bradford
• Santiago Lertora
• Jeremy Cole (Secretary)
• Shlomi Noach (Secretary)

Special thanks

Thank you to this year’s anonymous sponsor for donating the goblets!

Thank you to Colin Charles for acquiring and transporting the goblets!

Thank you to Santiago Lertora for working out the new swards website!

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.

makam

Most people know me as a MySQL consultant/instructor/speaker/something. I wear several hats; in one I am co-founder and CTO of SFNK, an Israeli company providing the makam system, a specialized service providing valuable insight on our customers increasing need: the need to know what people say about them on the internet. Our product is running for 7 years now, is serving large amounts of data, and is operating several MySQL server nodes.

I’ve been working with MySQL for over 11 years, but it is throughout my work in makam that I have come to look deeply into query & server optimization, backups, scale out, design etc. We had some demanding features that pushed me into developing scripts and solutions for MySQL, released as open source. Throughout my experience as a DBA (I’m originally a developer) I came to appreciate the MySQL product, on one had, and find usability fallacies, on the other. The fact that our product is DB centric put me in the position to learn as much as I could about SQL.

I thank makam for this. This product has been the test bed for many of my experiments. Thankfully I never erased the database!

The MySQL community

Though I just recently wrote this, I’m happy to acknowledge it again.

Since my work is based off open source products, open source projects, free advice, professional blogs, I have gained much from the open source world in general, and from the MySQL community in particular, that made me want to share some back.

Its wonderful to have people read and comment on my blog posts and ideas; download, use and provide feedback on code I write; attend an occasional talk. All this pushes me in my work. I honestly hope to have provided with valuable content, code or assistance, to just anyone. Anyone and someone who would benefit from the richness of open source and knowledge sharing.

I am humbled by the advantage I got from the community. I have found names behind the community’s first anonymous appearance. I’ve found people who are easy to reach, happy to respond, generous in their advice, experts in their field.

Thank you.

Oracle & MySQL

An observation on this award is that it is given to a MySQL technologist. I have never worked with Oracle (as in the RDBMS) technologies, and my entire nomination is based on my experience with MySQL.

I see significance in this, and believe it reaffirms the focus and attention MySQL gets from Oracle. It makes me happy as a MySQL user and as a MySQL community member.

I thank Oracle for giving me this honor.

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!