What is next?

In his keynote Baron reminded us that we need to focus on what we can do to improve community MySQL rather than wait for things to get done by the corporate owners. What will you do?

Many of us will continue to add high-end features to MySQL. It will great if those features make it into an official MySQL release. It will be a great business opportunity for the community if they do not.

In the short term, I have some things to do:

• run IO bound tests (iibench) for PBXT and provide the results to the PBXT team with a comparison to the v3 Google patch
  
• run IO bound tests (iibench) for XtraDB and provide the results to Percona with a comparison to the v3 Google patch
  
• publish more documentation for features in the v3 Google patch (support for roles, more changes to improve IO performance, more details on row-change logging)
• read the docs and evaluate embedded InnoDB 

Other people on my team also plan to share more details and code:

• Ben is working on a backport of the pool-of-threads code to MySQL 5.0. While the backport itself to 5.0.37 might not help those using 5.1 or recent 5.0 versions, we have also fixed the SMP performance problems in the pool-of-threads code and that change is isolated to a single file. Others will be able to use it (but only on Linux as it uses epoll directly).
• Justin may publish a patch for a recent version of 5.0 that only includes the changes for global group IDs, binlog event checksums and crash safe replication that works for all storage engines.
  

Much of the big patch is not easy to consume. But there is an answer to that. If you really want the feature then you can hire someone to port it to a recent 5.0 or 5.1 release. Rumor has it that Percona has done just that with several features. This makes me happy and proud.

InnoDB has continued to add valuable features to their releases. The most recent is embedded InnoDB. It can be used to do some very interesting things. But first I must read the docs. They have also added a lot of new functionality to the 5.1 branch via the InnoDB plugin. This includes fast index creation, compression and SMP performance improvements. This is a big deal as the standard response and practice from MySQL is that new features cannot go into a production branch.