DrupalCon Goes Big

Back now from DrupalCon, I'm parsing all that happened last week in Boston.  For me it was a whirlwind, interrupted by a plethora of hassles, including a nasty head cold, keyboard and trackpad on my MBP crapping out, a crashed demo, and several hours separated from my Treo while it rode around in the back of a Boston cab.  All that negative energy converging on me was more than offset by the positive vibe at the four day conference.  The kindness of the cabbie who drove crosstown to return my phone helped too.

One of the highlights for sure was spending time with a new Sun colleague, Brian Aker from MySQL.  We had breakfast at Henrietta's near Harvard Square before his keynote on Wednesday.   I asked him about the merger with Sun, what's next for MySQL, and how he'd like to see our field organizations work together.   He said the merger has been pretty well received and there was a general appreciation at MySQL for Sun's commitment to open source (something I hope will rub off on Brian's Slashdot amigo Chris Dibona, who conspicuously left Sun off of his Tuesday keynote list of companies that "get" open source).  There is a tradition of collaboration between Sun and MySQL too, which Brian indicated ought to help smooth the integration.   Lot's of his work is going into memcached these days, particularly in the libmemcached client.  He cleared up a misconception for me regarding Innodb: since Innodb is GPL'd, the risk of Oracle smothering it is nil - the community is driving it, and it's not the dead end many had feared.   What's next?  Don't expect to see MySQL 5.1 until 2009; do expect a maturing and further specializing application of the MySQL engines MyISAM, Innodb, BDB, and Archive; and plan for an adoption ramp for DRBD.  Brian had some great advice for Sun's field engineers: get familiar with MySQL technology by taking advantage of the many training resource available at MySQL.com.  MySQL University is a great place to start, (be sure to catch Brian's talk on EC2 March 29).  I also caught some good audio one-on-one with Brian after his keynote which I will post separately, along with his advice on scaling up your database.

RDF and Semantic Web were topics of much conversation and at least one BoF session.  With the addition of RDF modules in Drupal 6, developers can mashup data from multiple sites in very interesting ways.  If Web3.0 is massively distributed data mining, indexing, and mashing it all up, then Drupal is positioned to be the portal for this convergence, as Dries Buytaert resolutely declared in his Monday keynote

I gave a talk on running Drupal on Sun, with some help from Chris Cheetham from Project Caroline, at the end of the day on Wednesday (slides at right).  As luck would have it, my demo froze up, but I did manage to show Drupal running in a Solaris Zone, and DTrace to count function calls from Drupal.  Chris's demo of Drupal deployment to Project Caroline went much smoother.

Another highlight was awarding the grandprize Sun Fire T1000 server to the winners of the Showcase Site competition.  PingVision won it for their work on Popular Science Magazine.  Congratulations to Kevin Bridges and the rest of the crew at PingVision.

There was a lot of support for the next DrupalCon to be held in Hungary this fall.  It will be hard to top the Boston event, but I know this community will do their best to have the best one yet.