The annual MySQL Community Awards were held in Austin, Texas at Percona Live on Wednesday May 29, 2019 during the lunchtime keynotes. The MySQL Community Awards initiative is an effort to acknowledge and thank individuals and corporations for their contributions to the MySQL ecosystem. The nominations for the awards come from the community itself. It is a from-the-community, by-the-community, and for-the-community effort. There is no corporate involvement. Awards are given in the following three categories: Community Contributor (a person), Application (an application / project), and Corporate Contributor (a company). 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. These awards are not to be confused with the ones Oracle gives to the Community around version release time. In addition to the new location for Percona Live, we had a bit of an anomaly with the award winners — two of the winners were not present and had attendees receive the award on their behalf.
Community Contributor Award: two winners
There are two winners for the Community Contributor award this year. They were nominated for very similar reasons: a history of great bug finding for MySQL.
Zhai Weixiang
With over 130 bug reports, often including fixes for the bugs, Weixiang has had a great impact on the quality of MySQL. In the nomination comments, it was noted that Weixang has been contributing since 5.1 and, additionally, is an extremely good host for the ACMUG gatherings in Beijing, China.
Valerii Kravchuk
In addition to many bug reports, Valerii is a prolific blogger and frequent speaker at conferences. He has been active with MySQL since 2005, working for Oracle, Percona, and MariaDB. Valerii is well known for his “Fun With Bugs” blog series, which is up to #85 at this time. Valerii was not at the conference, but Vinceniu from MariaDB was there to recieve the award on his behalf.
Application Award:
dbdeployer
Dbdeployer is a tool which allow users to quickly test different versions of MySQL, MariaDB, and Percona Server. It recently got an overhaul from a Perl codebase to Go, and it has been extended to support TiDB, PXC, and even NDB. Guiseppe Maxia, the creator of dbdeployer, was not at the awards this year, but he nominated leFred to accept the award on his behalf.
Corporate Contributor:
Tencent
Tencent was nominated and won for the great contribution they did for MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB: Add instant column patch. Tencent is a big player present in the cloud that contributes back. Accepting this award for Tencent were Vin Chen and Felix Liang.
I don’t currently have any photos of the event itself, but here is a collection of tweets with photos from the community:
thank you @mysqlbugs for the nomination 🙂 #PerconaLive pic.twitter.com/294P5DsnvD
— zhai weixiang (@zhaiwx1987) May 29, 2019
The MySQL Community Award winners: @zhaiwx @mysqlbugs @datacharmer (for DBDeployer) @tencentcloud (for contributions to MariaDB & MySQL). First time ever 2 winners had representatives while being absent #PerconaLive pic.twitter.com/xWsyWhcnMM
— Colin Charles (@bytebot) May 29, 2019
Thanks to the #MySQL community for the application award to dbdeployer, and thanks @lefred for showing #dbdeployer colors at at #perconalive! pic.twitter.com/QAVrLr4wFq
— Giuseppe Maxia (@datacharmer) May 29, 2019
Thanks!
Thank you to the public for being passionate enough to nominate, the committee for voting, Agustín Gallego for being my co-secretary, the anonymous award goblet sponsor, and Colin Charles for ordering and transporting the award goblets all the way from Malaysia to Austin, Texas. And, as always, thank you to Percona for making it possible to host the awards at their conference.