Still blogging after all these years

What happened? Well, it has been a crazy year, probably the busiest year in my whole working life.

When you are in your late twenties/early thirties, you can dedicate all your energy to something, work, hobby, charity, sport, study, you name it. You work hard, and every now and then you have time to lie down and recharge your batteries. In one or two days, if you can sleep 9/10 hours per day, all the tiredness you have accumulated goes away. I have felt that feeling, but in your late forties, there is no such thing anymore.

When you are forty and you have a family, your priorities change. You try to accommodate work, family and friends. You remove most, if not all, of the time you dedicate to yourself. You have less rest, usually not enough to recharge. The 9/10 hours you used to recharge and be up and running, ready for a new week, they become barely 6/7 hours, if you are lucky… and you feel like your head is in a constant foggy atmosphere that does not allow you to think straight. You do, but you must use more energy and it takes more time simply to get things done.

So, this is what happened to me. But I was used to that. Even in the weird days of the post-acquisition, when many people could not really do much business-wise, I felt pretty busy.

Nevertheless, I managed to enjoy this fantastic year at SkySQL. 2011 has superseded 2005 (the year I joined MySQL AB), as the best year of my entire working life. Thanks to SkySQL, thanks to all my great colleagues, to all the partners, users and customers. And thanks to my family and friends, who are supporting me so much.

What are the plans for the future? In long term, it is hard to say, but the short term plan seems really exciting, more than ever, better than 2011. I can see so many new opportunities to use MySQL and MySQL-related products and to be involved in very cool projects. MySQL is not the only wild kid in the block anymore: PostgreSQL and the NoSQL armada are rightly claiming their space and users are adopting old and new technologies. This is good news, it repositions our technology right were it should be, leaving PostgreSQL, HBase, Cassandra and others doing what they do better.

Our technology - i.e. MySQL and the MySQL Ecosystem - is evolving and improving. There is a growing demand for database systems, there is space for everybody. There is space for new projects and for integrations with the current and new infrastructures.

SkySQL will be more and more focused on new solutions and on new architectures. The reference architecture is key for these new solutions. I will blog more about in in the near future and clarify the reference architecture is and what is not. We will offer legacy systems, we will support the standard, vanilla version of MySQL, the servers that Oracle and Percona can now provide. But we will offer more, much more. There is a whole new set of highly available systems - see my talks at various meetups in the US this week - there is a new way to integrate MySQL with other databases, and a new way to create huge data warehouses systems and compete head to head with Vertica or Greenplum, not to mention the quite outdated technologies in 11g. There is a huge demand of migration from legacy systems into the cloud, with MySQL.

Here is the promise - an End-Of-Year resolution, or an anticipated New Year resolution. I will share more of this experiences and the excitement of applying the open source values and technologies where until now only expensive commercial solutions were allowed. Some of my posts will be generic and will fit in here, in my personal blog. Other posts will be more MySQL specific and will be published in MySQL4all.

The future looks bright, I hope many will enjoy the ride with me.

-ivan