The next Helsinki MySQL User Group is set for Tuesday, February 19. Lari Pulkkinen from Arbitron Mobile will talk about their project adopting SSD disks for better MySQL performance. Yes, there are benchmarks included.

Note the changed location: Oracle office in Gräsantörmä 2, Espoo. We are glad to have Oracle Finland sponsoring the user group by taking turns as meetup host. Food and sauna will be available after the talk as is customary.

More details and signup at Meetup.com.

It's been a few months ago that I wrote a series of blog posts about Solon Voting. Solon is a project I started in July to implement cryptographically secure e-voting for direct democracy platforms, in particular Liquid Feedback which is used by the Pirate Party and other organizations in Central Europe. In the previous posts I already covered how delegated voting works, and how to divert the data flow of Liquid Feedback so that the voting phase could be handled by a cryptographically secure e-voting module. In the last post I then went on to look at requirements for secure e-voting. Those requirements are frequently referenced in this post.

Having laid out the requirements, I want to spend this post on briefly talking about the algorithms that exist for cryptographically secure e-voting. This is very superficial of course, it's intended to be layman understandable for those that don't really want to read the highly mathematical academic papers on the topic. If you do want to read academic papers, you can find lots of them on Google Scholar, just search for "e-voting" and you're all set for months to come! (No, I'm not qualified to recommend you any good papers. Just go and Google for something just like I did and if you find something interesting, let me know!)

This page has moved to: https://mysqlawards.org/mysql-hall-of-fame/

This page is a permanent home for listing all winners of MySQL Community, Partner and Application awards. It includes both the 2005-2009 awards chosen by MySQL AB marketing, as well as the 2010- awards chosen by a community panel.

Trivia: Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP and inventor of the SQL LIMIT clause is a winner of this award.
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It is a new year and it's time again to start thinking of all the great people and companies that make the MySQL ecosystem so great. It is time to start thinking of this year's MySQL Community Awards.

Last year we had a record number of winners, eleven goblets were handed out! But behind the scenes things were even more exciting, there were several ties that forced the panel to do extra tie-breaking voting rounds. In one category we even had a 6-way tie! All of this just testifies to how much is happening in the MySQL world nowadays.

As we were driving the 9 hour trip to visit our parents, the childrens grandparents, for New Years, my wife at some point decided we had enough of childrens songs and inserted daddy's favorite CD: the live recording of Leningrad Cowboys Total Balaika Show in Helsinki, 1993. This historical and amazingly weird outdoor concert is perhaps best explained by you simply watching a few Youtube videos from the concert, but it brought together a Finnish punk band turned Soviet Union parody and the actual, very much official Red Army choir aka Alexandrov Ensemble. Wikipedia has more details, but just to underscore the historical backdrop: in 1994 they also performed in Berlin, while the last Russian troups were leaving Eastern Germany.

There are a few interesting learning resources recently created by activists in the MySQL community. I just wanted to link to them to spread the word. They are free and if you've been looking for a way to learn more about MySQL, you should have a look at these.

MySQL Marinate

This is something I haven't really seen done before (for MySQL): a virtual self study group. It is based on the idea of everyone reading the same book, and I assume Sheeri will then facilitate some commentary on what your read. Sheeri mentioned this in a blog post earlier, but yesterday I went to check the signup page and wow - there are already 117 (or 76, depending on whether you look to the left or to the right) students registered!

Percona Live UK took place this week. It was the second year in a row and once again a great conference. Thank you Percona for bringing the show to Europe, it means a lot for the European MySQL community - many people who don't visit the Santa Clara conference were present in London. It's kind of funny, I even meet more Finnish MySQL users in London than I do at home!

I gave 2 talks. Slides are now posted on Slideshare:

As a few LinkedIn friends already noticed, I have started working together with the Galera team at Codership. It is a part time "advisor" position and I still continue my full time work at Nokia, supporting various databases behind the new HERE.com portal.

We get a lot of requests for more blogs and better documentation to explain in-depth how Galera work. That's an area I will work on a lot. The first "deliverable" is out today: the first Galera white paper.