I’m sitting here in the lounge at SFO thinking back on the last week, the majority of which has been spent meeting my new workmates and attending the Percona MySQL conference.

For me it has been as much of a family reunion as it has been about seeing the wonderful things going on in MySQL.

Having joined Continuent last month after an ‘absence’ in NoSQL land of almost 2.5 years, joining the MySQL community again just felt like coming home after a long absence. And that’s no bad thing. On a very personal level it was great to see so many of my old friends, many of whom were not only pleased to see me, but pleased to see me working back in the MySQL fold. Evidently many people think this is where I belong.

What was great to see is that the MySQL community is alive and well. Percona may be the drivers behind the annual MySQL conference that we have come to know, but behind the name on the passes and over the doors, nothing has changed in terms of the passion behind the core of the project.

Additionally, it’s great to see that despite all of the potential issues and tragedies that were predicted when Oracle took over the reins of MySQL, as Baron says, they are in fact driving and pushing the project forward. The features in 5.6 are impressive and useful, rather than just a blanket cycling of the numbers. I haven’t had the time to look at 5.7, but I doubt it is just an annual increment either. When I left Oracle, people were predicting MySQL would be dead in two years as an active project at Oracle, but in fact what seems to have happened is that the community has rallied round it and Oracle have seen the value and expertly steered it forward.

It’s also interesting to me – as someone who moved outside the MySQL fold – to note that other databases haven’t really supplanted the core of the MySQL foothold. Robert Hodge’s Keynote discussed that in more depth, and I see no reason to disagree with him.

I’m pleased to see that my good friend Giuseppe had his MySQL Sandbox when application of the year 2013 – not soon enough in my eyes, given that as a solution for running MySQL it has been out there for more years than I care to remember.

I’m also delighted of course that Continuent won Corporate contributor of the year. One of the reasons I joined the company is because I liked what they were doing. Replication in MySQL is unnecessarily hard, particularly when you get more than one master, or want to do clever things with topologies beyond the standard master/slave. I used Federated tables to do it years ago, but Tungsten makes the whole process easier.  What Continuent does is provide an alternative to MySQL native replication which is not only more flexible, but also fundamentally very simple. In my experience, simple ideas are always very powerful, because their simplicity makes them easy to adapt, adopt and add to.

Of course, Continuent aren’t the only company producing alternatives for clustering solutions with MySQL, but to me that shows there is a healthy ecosystem willing to build solutions around the powerful product at the centre. It’s one thing to choose an entirely different database product, but another to use the same product with one or more tools that produces an overall better solution to the problem. *AMP solutions haven’t gone away, we’ve just extended and expanded on top of them. That must mean that MySQL is just as powerful and healthy a core product as it ever was.

That’s my key takeaway from this conference – MySQL is alive and well, and the ecosystem it produced is as organic and thriving as it ever has been, and I’m happy to be back in the middle of that.