I have been considering this for a while, but the 2019 edition of the MySQL Community Awards will be the final year. Over the past couple of years, the Percona Live conference has been expanding well beyond the walls of MySQL. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious event to hold the awards at, where there is both a large number of MySQL community members attending and the winners of the awards are also present.

The beauty of these awards was that there was no corporate entity involved – they were completely from the people and for the people. I was always really happy to give out an award to people that may not always be recognized and to celebrate what they had done.

The awards have been given out for 15 years now and they were picked up by the community from MySQL AB after 2009. I only managed the awards for a few years of the 15 total years, and before me — it was Shlomi Noach, and before him — Henrik Ingo. For a bunch of Award related trivia – see the end of this post: https://mysqlawards.org/mysql-hall-of-fame/

Thank you to the many members of the voting committee, the members of the community who cared enough to nominate, and to Santiago Lertora for hosting/sponsoring the website.

If you have a strong desire to take over stewardship of these awards, please find me on mysqlcommunity slack and I can lend a hand.

The MySQL Community Awards initiative is an effort to acknowledge and thank individuals and corporations 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 2017 community awards were presented on April 27, 2017, during the keynotes at the Percona Live conference. The winners are:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2017

• René Cannaò
  René – for creating and maintaining the ProxySQL project actively.
• Shlomi Noach
  Shlomi has been a been a conference chairperson for years, ran these mysqlawards for a long time, has been blogging for many, many years, and also has quite a few popular MySQL projects. Thank you Shlomi Noach for all your work on orchestrator and gh-ost.
• Simon Mudd
  Some quotes from nominations for Simon:  “[he] contributed massively to the quality of MySQL, finding and reporting issues, and suggesting improvements in all areas of MySQL. Through his work at booking.com, he has helped to provide a test bed platform at scale that helps to test future versions, to the benefit of all in the MySQL community. He helps to run the Madrid MySQL user group, blogs, talks at conferences, and even contributes code to the server (logging to syslog).” “He has given us a lot of feedback on upgrade/downgrade. Balancing code cleanup and backwards compatibility is a harder problem than it sounds. We’ve got much better criteria now of what’s OK vs not OK. Everyone that uses mysql benefits.”

MySQL Community Awards: Application of the year 2017

• gh-ost
  “A truly innovative solution to a long-term issue within the MySQL world, developed openly, with great community excitement around it.” “After all of the schema change tools that are sort of external, using relatively flaky features like triggers, a schema change tool that uses more core parts of the server (binlogging) and provides more features as a result is a pretty big step forward”
• sysbench
  Sysbench: an extremely widely used tool which had been in 0.x numbering for many, many years.  It recently got a lot more love and finally version 1 was released in January 2017.  Thank you to Alexey Kopytov for sysbench version 1!

MySQL Community Awards: Corporate Contributor of the year 2017

• GitHub
  GitHub for gh-ost, and for corporate sponsoring. For a number of years now Github has been the community source repository for not only the MySQL server (and other MySQL projects), but also a huge number of community related projects, forks and branches.
• Percona
  Percona “for the conference, open source tools, blog, webinar, … AND especially for hosting two separate Percona Live events annually — which seems to be the biggest meeting of MySQL+forks users.” For many of us, the conferences are the only time we get to see each other in person.

Congrats to all winners!

Committee members

• Baron Schwartz
• Colin Charles
• Daniël van Eeden
• Domas Mituzas
• Eric Herman
• Fernando Ipar
• Giuseppe Maxia
• Jeremy Cole
• Justin Swanhart
• Kenny Gryp
• Mark Leith
• Morgan Tocker
• Rasmus Johansson
• Santiago Lertora
• Sergei Golubchik
• Yoshinori Matsunobu

Co-secretaries:

• Daniel Nichter
• Emily Slocombe

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!

…

Editorial note: this should have been published after the Percona Live conference in  April 2017.  I forgot – my apologies! 🙂