What a great week ...

... in terms of MySQL :-))). On Friday I passed the MySQL Core Exam (on my first try) and today I was announced as the winner of the 2nd IPod on the MySQL 5.0 contest (http://www.planetmysql.org/kaj/?p=21.

That's even greater if you know that I'm just a little self-employed developer, starting just 2 1/2 years ago with no big company behind me. I once used to believe that there is some software on the market and you can use it - but you have to take it like it is and if there's something you'd think that could be improved, you have to live with it. MySQL convinced me that I was wrong. When the first alpha versions of MySQL 5 came out, I was curious about it and I started testing - I wrote bug reports when I found that something wasn't working the way I expected and also made recommandations how I thought that features could work better or which features I was missing. And I was surprised to see how quickly developers reacted on my input, cleared bugs and discussed about suggestions - and I saw that even I little guy can make a contribution to improve a product that's used by some million users around the world. That's one of the things that I love about MySQL - a great community of a product that's great and still trying to become better and better and a product that comes with a license that's fair to users with a good balance between freedom and a commercial approach (http://www.mysql.com/network/compare.html) - giving every user the choice to choose what's best for him.

How many people love to use MySQL was easy to see when I together with two friends of mine started the db4free.net project at the end of June. Even without any budget for advertising, there are now more than 1,100 users from 53 countries from all continents. db4free provides the very latest version of MySQL 5.0 and is always being updated immediately when a new version is released. There are plans to also install a second MySQL server with MySQL 5.1 soon after its first alpha release and to give users the option whether to create a database account on the MySQL 5.0 server or on the 5.1 server.

So there's still a lot of great things to come and a lot of work to do. I'd like to thank everyone who's involved in making MySQL a great product and ask everyone to continue doing great work. I'm looking forward to seeing the first MySQL 5.0 Production Release and I'm very curious about the MySQL 5.1 version :-).