The MongoDB Ecosystem: Energy, Commitment and Passion

Our American friends are celebrating thanksgiving and, even if I'm not, I'd like to spend a few lines to say thank you to the amazing MongoDB ecosystem.

November has been a great month. This week we've been invited by Xpand-it to a great event in Lisbon and by Jaspersoft to their JasperDirections conference in Milan. SPP42 recently hosted a MongoDB conference in Ankara and we're platinum sponsors at Codemotion Milan with Byte-code. We've also co-sponsored a Big Data conference in Israel with Trainologic.
Partners are reaching out to us with greenfield opportunities and making MongoDB the core of their business.

This is what happens each and every month when you have such great allies!

We perceive your energy, commitment and passion and rest assured that we're here to support you. To that end, we've launched the project referral form. Do you want to work with a MongoDB expert to help your customers adopt our technology? Fill the questionnaire appropriately and we'll cooperate with you on the opportunity.

Let's go and conquer the market together!

MySQL Events that I don't want to miss

Do you want to closely follow what MySQL is doing around the globe? We've created a Lanyrd guide just for that. It's curated by the MySQL Community, Marketing, Presales and Product Management teams and with some other contributions too.
Tomorrow we'll host the MySQL Innovation Day (in streaming too) and MySQL Connect is also quickly approaching. If you'd like showcase your products and services to the MySQL Community you can take advantage of the various sponsorship opportunities.

Stay tuned for the latest and greatest updates from the MySQL team at Oracle and from our vibrant community!

Changing Name and Improving Focus

You might have noticed that this blog changed name and URL. Instead of having one single blog for everything, I decided to split my blogging activities in two separate blogs.

If you're interested in MySQL, Oracle, Databases, Business Intelligence, Open Source, Cloud, etc. this is the place to be. Blog's new name is Data & Co.
A big "Thank you!" to David Stokes who moved all the planet.mysql.com references to the old blog to this new one.

On the other hand, if you'd like to read about communication, marketing, advertising, PR, soft skills, etc. feel free look at Publicime.  Please see the introduction of my new blog here. I've moved non-technical articles to this one to make sure my posts on Data & Co are exclusively technology-centric.

This will result in better focus for both blogs and I won't annoy you with topics you're not interested in. The old url is redirecting to Data & Co. by default.

2011, A great year for MySQL in review...

I see so many posts on what happened to company X, product Y and dream Z that I couldn't resist the temptation to summarize this great year for MySQL. At the end of 2010, Oracle did an announcement we were all waiting for: MySQL 5.5 is GA! Another year has passed since then and it's time to reflect on what has been done.

I know this is a long post. I tried to rewrite it at least 10 times to make it shorter, but I couldn't condense the list. Hence, I wrote a summary in the beginning for those who don't want to read it all.

I believe that 2011 was an exceptional year for MySQL and I really enjoy being part of this team. I wish all of us a lot of success and fun in the years to come!

Summary:
Oracle released many MySQL 5.6 and MySQL Cluster 7.2 DMRs accompanied by new versions of MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Enterprise Backup, MySQL Workbench (and utilities), MySQL Proxy, MySQL Cluster Manager and Connectors.

The MySQL team unveiled new products like the MySQL Installer for Windows and Oracle VM Templates for MySQL. Besides, the MySQL Enterprise offering has been enriched with new commercial extensions. MySQL can now be leveraged as one of the Oracle data management solutions with new certifications and the integration with My Oracle Support increased the business value of customers' investment on Oracle technologies.

Additionally MySQL presented at major events across the world and won a few awards.

Blogging: Free or Moderated Comments?

I've just changed the settings of this blog, moving from free to moderated comments. It's impressive how many comments are coming from spammers and from people interested in optimizing their ranking in search engines (SEO). While this will imply a few more clicks from my side, I'll do all my best to approve each and every relevant comment as soon as possible.

To briefly extend the topic, I'd like to point to a few sites containing notable statistics on both legal an illicit use of communication channels:

• MessageLabs Intelligence - This website hosts the MessageLabs Intelligence report, which provides the latest threat trends to keep you informed regarding the ongoing fight against viruses, spam and other unwelcome content.
  
• Email Marketing Consumer Report - ContactLab presents the results of the latest research on the use of e-mail among Internet users. The study, in its European edition, describes and compares e-mail and newsletters habits and behaviour in Italy, Spain, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, highlighting similarities and differences between the different markets.

Email, Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, etc.. are all good ways to improve brand awareness, generate leads and deliver marketing campaigns, but unfortunately sometimes they are used in a wrong manner. I hope that in the future there will be a way to counteract this phenomenon, but for now comments are moderated and spam filters on email accounts are in place! ;)

Luca