Lenz Grimmer's blog

Der Zeitplan des "MySQL & Friends" Developer Rooms auf der FOSDEM steht! Mein Dank gilt allen Vortragenden, die sich die Zeit genommen hatten, Vorschläge einzureichen. Letztendlich mußten wir eine Auswahl treffen, die Agenda ist nun auf dem MySQL Forge Wiki hinterlegt und wird auch in Kürze im offiziellen FOSDEM-Programm zu finden sein. Unter den Vortragenden sind viele bekannte Namen dabei und ich denke, wir haben ein sehr attraktives Programm zusammengestellt.

Gestern erhielt ich die Bestätigung, daß mein Vortragvorschlag für die GUUG Frühjahrsfachgespräche in Weimar im März angenommen wurde. Am Dienstag, den 24.3. um 11:30 werde ich einen Überblick über das Thema MySQL Replikationstechnologien geben. Im Slot davor wird Erkan einen Vortrag mit dem vielversprechenden Titel Baukasten MySQL halten. Ich freue mich schon sehr darauf! Auch der Rest des Vortragsprogramms sieht sehr interessant aus — ich habe viele mir bekannte Namen (besonders aus dem Sun-Umfeld) entdeckt.

Übrigens: der LinuxTag 2011 findet dieses Jahr vom 11.-14. Mai wieder in Berlin statt. Der Call for Papers geht noch bis 25. Januar. Ich habe ein paar Vortragsvorschläge zum Thema MySQL eingereicht, hoffentlich finden sie Zuspruch. Ich würde es auf jeden Fall begrüßen, wenn noch ein paar weitere MySQL-Vorträge von anderen dazukommen

Nur als kleine Erinnerung: bis Sonntag, 26. Dezember können noch Vortragsvorschläge für den "MySQL & Friends" Developer Room auf der FOSDEM in Brüssel abgeben werden. Die FOSDEM-Veranstalter stellen uns für diesen Zweck am Samstag, den 5. Februar von 13:00-17:00 den Raum H.2213 (100 Plätze) zur Verfügung. Wir haben schon eine Reihe interessanter Vorträge erhalten, würden uns aber noch auf weitere Zusendungen freuen! Jeder Vorschlag rund um das Thema MySQL ist willkommen. Pro Vortrag planen wir 20 Minuten Gesprächszeit plus 5 Minuten Diskussion ein, so daß wir insgesamt 12 Vorträge halten können.

Wir freuen uns über weitere Themenvorschläge oder auch Hinweise auf interessante Referenten, die wir noch ansprechen könnten! Vielen Dank.

Just as a friendly reminder about what I wrote a month ago: we've already received a number of great talk submissions for the MySQL & Friends Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011, thanks to everyone who contributed so far! However, we still are looking for some more!

You can submit your proposal via this form. The deadline for turning in your talk is Sunday, 26th of December, 2010.

Just to recapitulate, the DevRoom (H.2213) will be available to us on Saturday 5th 2011, from 13:00 till 19:00. Each session will last 20 minutes plus 5 minutes of Q&A. See this year's schedule for inspiration — I think we had a great lineup of talks that addressed a good mixture of MySQL-related topics. I am looking forward to your ideas and suggestions! Thanks in advance for your support.

Am 5.+6. Februar 2011 findet in Brüssel die "Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting" (FOSDEM) - Konferenz statt. Auch im nächsten Jahr wird es wieder einen "Developer Room" zum Thema MySQL geben. Unter dem Motto "MySQL & Friends" möchten wir ein umfangreiches Programm an Vorträgen rund um den MySQL Server zusammenstellen, mit dem wir Entwickler und MySQL-Administratoren gleichermaßen ansprechen wollen.

Jeder Vortrag wird 20 Minuten dauern (plus 5 Minuten Q&A). Es sind insgesamt 12 Slots zu vergeben. Der Call for Papers ist bereits eröffnet - Vorschläge für Vorträge (in englischer Sprache) können bis Sonntag, 26. Dezember hier eingereicht werden.

Weitere Informationen gibt es auf dem MySQL Forge Wiki und dem englischen Call for Papers.

Ich freue mich auf Eure Themenvorschläge!

It's that time of the year again — the nice folks at FOSDEM have granted us a developer room at their upcoming conference (February 5+6 2011 in Brussels, Belgium)!

As usual there were more applications than they were able to accommodate, so we are very grateful for this opportunity for collaboration. Titled "MySQL and Friends", our room next year will be H.2213 with a capacity of 100 seats. It will be at our disposal on Saturday 5th, from 13:00 till 19:00. Like last year, we would like to set up a schedule of talks related to the MySQL server and the various projects that surround it. Each talk will last 20 minutes, plus 5 minutes of Q&A and a 5 minute break for switching speakers, giving us 12 slots in total to fill with excellent tech talks. Take a look at this year's schedule for some examples! I hope we can assemble an even more exciting and interesting schedule for next year.

Quoting from my last year's call for papers:

We are looking for covering a wide range of topics that attract both MySQL DBAs as well as application developers that work with MySQL as their database of choice. Are you developing a new storage engine or other plugin? Do you want to share your experiences and best practices in administering or deploying MySQL servers? Did you develop a new method to scale a MySQL setup? Let us and the audience know about it! You can submit your talk proposal via this submission form.

The deadline for turning in your proposal is Sunday, 26th of December, 2010, after which there will be a voting and rating period to identify the most interesting and attractive topics.

Please check the FOSDEM 2011 information page on the MySQL Forge Wiki for more details and don't hesitate to contact me directly, if you have any questions or suggestions. I look forward to your proposals!

With OpenSQL Camp and FrOSCon being over for almost a week now, it's time to come up with a short summary. I traveled home on Monday morning and then took Tuesday off, so I had some catching up to do...

As for the past years, FrOSCon rocked again! According to the closing keynote, they had around 1.500 (unique) visitors and I had a great time there. I really enjoyed meeting all the old and new faces of the various Open Source communities. The lineup of speakers was excellent, Jon "maddog" Hall's keynote about "Free and Open Source Software in the Developing World" was quite insightful and inspiring.

Most of the time I was busy with speaking at and running the OpenSQL Camp session track in room "HS6", but I managed to sneak out and listen to a few other talks as well. Additionally, I gave a presentation about ZFS on Linux, which had a good crowd and some interesting discussions.

This year, all of the sessions in the main lecture halls were streamed live, so people not able to attend could at least get a glimpse on what was going on these two days. Many times it was a really tough decision to make – there were way too many good sessions going in parallel. So being able to see the recording afterwards somewhat relieved that pain. The FrOSCon team has already begun to publish the video files – they are separated by day and lecture room and can be obtained from http://froscon.tv/.

And we were really lucky with the weather, too - the weekend was warm and sunny, a perfect setting for the social event, which is one of the highlights of FrOSCon. Impressive: this year, the attendees consumed one cubic meter (1000 liters) of Beer!

Finally, I'd like to express my special gratitude to all the speakers of OpenSQL Camp – thank you very much for your support and for devoting your time to participate in our subconference! It was appreciated.

Greetings from Sankt Augustin, Germany! I've arrived by train today and just returned from the FrOSCon venue, which will start tomorrow. The organizers are still busy with the preparations, but things already seem to be in good shape.

It was a mild and sunny evening today. Hopefully it will be the same tomorrow again, so we can enjoy a relaxed BBQ outside! The social event at FrOSCon is always a nice opportunity to meet and talk with fellow open source enthusiasts, users and developers.

And finally some good news for those of you who can't make it to FrOSCon this year: there will be live video streams from selected lecture rooms! So you will be able to attend the OpenSQL Camp sessions virtually - just head over to http://live.froscon.org/ and select room "HS6". It'll be interesting to see how this will work out.

Ich möchte nur kurz auf einige Konferenzen mit MySQL-Inhalten aufmerksam machen, die in der nächsten Zeit so anstehen:

Am nächsten Wochenende (21. und 22. August) findet in Sankt Augustin bei Bonn die Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) statt. Auch in diesem Jahr wird es wieder einen von mir organisierten Track namens "OpenSQL Camp" geben. Es wird insgesamt 12 Vorträge rund um das Thema MySQL und andere Open-Source Datenbanken geben. Darüberhinaus haben die Veranstalter der FrOSCon einen dedizierten Track zum Thema "NoSQL Datenbanken" zusammengestellt. Es wird also reichlich Information zum Thema Datenbanken auf der FrOSCon geben!

Ich habe übrigens 10 Freikarten für die FrOSCon zu vergeben, die Teil unseres Sponsoring-Pakets sind (MySQL/Oracle ist Silber-Sponsor). Wer Interesse hat, sollte sich schnell bei mir per E-Mail melden – first come, first serve!

Das nächste OpenSQL Camp findet dann wieder in den USA statt, und zwar vom 15. bis 17. Oktober in Boston.

Davor gibt es noch einen Pflichttermin in den USA – die im September in San Francisco stattfindende Oracle OpenWorld, die dieses Mal gleich mehrere Konferenzen unter einem Dach anbietet: neben der "klassischen OpenWorld" wird es die Java One und Oracle Develop Entwicklerkonferenzen sowie den MySQL Sunday geben. Besonders letzterer verspricht interessant zu werden, es haben viele namhafte Speaker aus der MySQL-Community zugesagt.

Herbst und Winter ist traditionell Hochsaison was Konferenzen angeht, und auch dieses Jahr wird wieder einiges geboten. Seit der Übernahme von MySQL durch Oracle zeigen sich besonders die diversen Oracle-Anwendergruppen sehr stark daran interessiert, das Thema MySQL aufzugreifen. Nach der ODTUG Kaleidoscope, die im Juni/Juli in den USA stattfand, stehen nun die DOAG Konferenz in Nürnberg (16.-18. November) und die UKOUG Conference Series Technology & E-Business Suite 2010 in Birmingham (29. November - 1. Dezember) an, die ebenfalls dedizierte Vortragsreihen zum Thema MySQL anbieten werden. Achtung: für die Konferenz in England können noch bis kommenden Montag Vortragsvorschläge eingereicht werden! Wir freuen uns über jeden Beitrag.

If you wonder why there hasn't been an update from me for quite a while — I just returned from two months of paternal leave, in which I actually managed to stay away from the PC most of the time. In the meanwhile, I've officially become an Oracle employee and there is a lot of administrative things to take care of... But it feels good to be back!

During my absence, Giuseppe and Felix kicked off the Call for Papers for this year's European OpenSQL Camp, which will again take place in parallel to FrOSCon in St. Augustin (Germany) on August 21st/22nd. We've received a number of great submissions, now we would like to ask our community about your favourites!

Basically it's "one vote per person per session" and you can cast your votes in two ways, either by twittering @opensqlcamp or via the opensqlcamp mailing list. The procedure is outlined in more detail on this wiki page.

As we need to finalize the schedule and inform the speakers, the voting period will close this coming Sunday, 18th of July. So don't hesitate, cast your votes now! Based on your feedback we will compile the session schedule for this year's camp. Thanks for your help!

As I already wrote, I will be speaking at the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara in two weeks and I am excited to be there again. This year's conference is going to be interesting for a number of reasons, but most importantly I think that the schedule looks great! This is going to be a "drinking from the firehose of MySQL knowledge" event. Afterwards, I'll be on parental leave in May and June, so I likely will miss a lot of great conferences – these months are usually quite packed, as our Open Source Events Calendar can confirm. I just received a notice that my talk submission to OSCON has been rejected, which currently leaves me with two more speaking engagements in the upcoming weeks:

On April 24th, I'll be at the Grazer Linuxtage in Graz, Austria. The schedule has not been published yet, but I've been asked to give a keynote on the subject of working in a virtual company and a more technical session about MySQL HA solutions. Linuxtage is said to be the second largest Opensource event in Austria – they had 28 different sessions and around 450 visitors last year. I haven't been to an event in Austria for a while, so I look forward to being there!

Even though I'm technically on leave at that time, I will attend the amoocon in Rostock, Germany in June (4-6). While last year's focus at this event was on opensource telephony (Asterisk, VoIP et al), they decided to broaden the scope for this year's event: "It is a boutique conference where we create an environment to give every attendee a fair chance to actually speak to each speaker. So you can tank knowledge and new ideas without the bullshit-bingo." I really enjoyed my stay there last year and look forward to talking about "A look into a MySQL DBA's toolchest" (for those who won't make it to my talk about this at the MySQL conference) and "Why you should be using a DVCS". I noticed that Monty Widenius will be there as well, speaking about "MariaDB release 5.1 - What is it and what to expect from it." and "MySQL & MariaDB history". The organizers are also looking for a speaker from the PostgreSQL camp, so this is going to be an interesting event for me. In addition to that, Rostock is a pretty nice city and the baltic sea is nearby. The organizers have limited the number of attendees to 100 people and the ticket price is slowly increasing every second day – so make your reservations now!

Berkeley DB (BDB) is undoubtedly the workhorse among the opensource embedded database engines. It started as a university project in the mid-eighties and was further developed by Sleepycat Software, until it got acquired by Oracle in February 2006.

I had the impression that BDB had lost a lot of its popularity among opensource developers to SQLite in recent times, which has evolved into becoming the default choice for developers looking for an embedded data store. I'd assume primarily because the code is not released under any particular license, but put in the public domain (which makes it very attractive for embedding it into one's code), and also because it's lightweight, supports SQL and has interfaces to a number of languages.

Of course, SQLite has its limitations and use cases (as every product), so it may not be suited for some particular application. As the SQLite developers put it: "SQLite is not designed to replace Oracle. It is designed to replace fopen().".

Yesterday, Oracle announced a new version of BDB. One of the notable features of this release is the introduction of a new SQL API, based on SQLite. According to Gregory Burd, Product Manager for Berkeley DB at Oracle, they did so by including a version of SQLite which uses Berkeley DB for storage (replacing btree.c). I think this is a very smart move – instead of introducing a new API, developers can now easily switch to a different storage backend in case they are experiencing issues with the default SQLite implementation. So now MySQL isn't the only database with different storage backends anymore

I am curious to learn more about how the BDB implementation compares against the original (both feature- and performance-wise).

Oh, and this is actually not the first time someone put an SQL interface in front of Berkeley DB – BDB was the first transaction-safe storage engine that provided page-level locking for MySQL in version 3.23.15 (released in May 2000). The InnoDB storage engine was added some time afterwards (MySQL 3.23.34a, released in March 2001).

With IntelliJ now being available under an Open Source license, developers have another option to choose from when it comes to Java-based IDEs/Frameworks (Eclipse and NetBeans being the other two prominent ones). Choice is always good, and being an Open Source enthusiast, I of course welcome JetBrain's move!

However, as I'm not really a heavy GUI-based IDE user myself, I can't really comment on which one is the best. These kind of discussions tend to turn into a Holy War anyway... In the end it's likely that each of them gets the job done and you have to come to your own conclusions, based on your personal preference and requirements.

I personally would be interested in seeing how their support for PHP or Python compares to the one in NetBeans. Their plugin repository lists more that 560 plugins, including many for database connectivity/modeling/navigation (incl. support for MySQL). I'm also glad to see that they have a plugin for Bazaar, something that I'm desperately missing from NetBeans!

Interestingly, they decided to keep a few parts proprietary, it's going to be interesting to see how this will turn out for them and if developers will be willing to pay for these extra features, considering that most of this is available for free from the other two projects.

Their Contributor License Agreement looks like it has been derived from the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA), which is always nice to see. I assume this can be attributed to Roman Strobl - I was positively surprised to notice that he joined their team as a technology evangelist in June! Roman did a great job in spreading the NetBeans and OpenSolaris gospel at Sun before and I briefly met him at this year's FOSDEM conference in Brussels. Congratulations!

The summer break seems to be over and the event season is heating up again! There is a number of conferences and events coming up in the next months — here is a quick summary of the events that I plan to attend.

This Friday I will attend an event here in Hamburg: the "Silpion Sommerfest", organized by Silpion (a local IT solutions provider which is a partner of Sun Microsystems as well). I will be there to network and talk about MySQL.

This coming weekend (2009-09-12/2009-09-13), there will be the PHP Unconference here in Hamburg, Germany . It will consist of two days of Barcamp-style sessions about PHP. Sun/MySQL are sponsors of the event and I expect several of my team mates to be there as well. With more than 180 participants, the event is already sold out.

The following week I will be attending the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg, Germany on 2009-09-17/2009-09-20. I will give the opening keynote on Thursday morning. Titled "Working in a Virtual Community", I will talk about the pros and cons of working in a virtual organization, giving an overview about some of the technical and social aspects that play a role in working with virtual communities.

On December 10th and 11th I will be attending the 4. Secure Linux Administration Conference 2009 (SLAC) in Berlin, Germany. I've been invited to talk about MySQL and will give two sessions about MySQL Backup & Security as well as MySQL High Availability Solutions. The Call for Papers for this event is still open, so if you have a technical, "best practice" talk that might be relevant for system administrators, consider submitting your proposal!

It's almost two weeks now since FrOSCon and the OpenSQL Camp subconference have taken place in Sankt Augustin, Germany — about time for a summary and update from my side!

First off, I would like to thank all of the participants and supporters, particularly my colleagues Regina Steyer and Iris Musiol for the perfect logistics and co-sponsoring as well as Uli Graef, Thorsten Frueauf, Matthias Schmidt, Alexander Rubin and Joerg Moellenkamp for manning the Sun booth and the help on site.

Another big Thank You goes out to my team mates Giuseppe and Colin as well as to Sheeri K. Cabral, who were a big help in keeping the OpenSQL Camp on track and by supporting the event by giving talks. In addition to that, Sheeri recorded most of the OpenSQL Camp sessions on video and published them in record time!

So here's a quick summary of both events from my side, starting with the main conference.

Sun was a Gold sponsor of the event and we had a booth right at the main entrance area; it could hardly be missed. It consisted of two large and two small desks as well as a divider behind them. For demos, we had a (slightly noisy) Sun Fire X2200 M2 Server and four SunRay 2 Thin Clients (which by themselves triggered a lot of questions and curiosity by many visitors). The booth was flanked by rollup-banners on both sides as well as various posters attached to the divider. Here's a picture of our booth before the event opened:



We demoed Open Solaris, Open HA Cluster, NetBeans/Java and MySQL. We also had a lot of brochures about various products, OpenSolaris 2009.06 Live-CDs incl. booklets as well as some MySQL-T-Shirts to hand out. We distributed over 300 CDs and received a lot of positive feedback about the distribution.

We also had a number of talks in the main conference track (both German and English):

• Lenz Grimmer: Working for a Virtual Company - How we do it at MySQL (OGG Video)
• Giuseppe Maxia: MySQL Sandbox 3 - Making your life with databases easier than ever (OGG Video)
• Ulrich Graef: ZFS - Neue Funktionen und Technologien
• Thorsten Früauf: Hochverfügbarkeit mit minimalem Cluster - Open HA Cluster on OpenSolaris (OGG Video)
• Jörg Möllenkamp: Insights to Opensolaris (OGG Video)

The comments and ratings of these sessions were generally very positive. Our booth was well attended, especially during the session breaks. In total, there were over 1.400 visitors at the conference over the two days.

I personally did not attend many sessions in the main conference tracks, as I was too occupied with the OpenSQL Camp and the booth organization. However, I managed to listen to Uli Graef's talk, which was a very technical and interesting session about ZFS features and internals. Being a big fan of ZFS myself, this was a very worthwhile session to be at and my impression was that it encouraged others to take a closer look at this truly amazing file system.

The second talk I attended was Sunday's keynote by Dries Buytaert from the Drupal project about "The Secrets of Building and Participating in Open Source
Communities". Dries is a great speaker with visually stunning slides. He is funny, too — if you have a moment, you should watch the video recording of his keynote. An uncut "pre-release" version of his talk is already available as an OGG Video file.

As for previous FrOSCons (is that the proper plural?), there was a social event scheduled for Saturday evening, providing barbecue (Steaks and Sausages as well as vegetarian dishes) and drinks. This event usually takes place outside and is always an excellent opportunity for networking and talking with key people from other OSS communities and projects. And there was plenty of time for talking - the queues for the grilled food were long...

Here is a list of other blogs and articles about FrOSCon that are worth a read (in no particular order and both German and English):

• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5878-FrOSCon-2009-first-day.html
• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5879-FrOSCon-09-Nachlese.html
• http://blogs.sun.com/TF/entry/hochverf%C3%BCgbarkeit_mit_minimalem_cluster
• http://robilad.livejournal.com/53194.html
• http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/froscon_the_free_and_open
• http://www.linux-magazin.de/content/view/full/43032
• http://community.oreilly.de/blog/2009/08/25/das-war-die-froscon-2009/
• http://www.naturalnik.de/wordpress/2009/08/froscon-2009/
• http://www.alexander-stelter.de/blog/archives/361-FrOSCon-2009-Review-+-Bilder.html

OpenSQL Camp, European Edition

In addition to the main conference tracks, FrOSCon also provided a number of so-called "Developer Rooms" to OSS projects, so that they could organize sub-conferences or hackfests of their own. We applied for a room to set up a conference dubbed "OpenSQL Camp", related to the topic of Open Source databases, which was approved.

We then sent out a call for papers and invited people from the many OSS database communities to join us and talk about their projects. Every session proposal was published on the OpenSQL Camp web site and people were able to vote on the sessions they were most interested in via email or twitter:

• http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/2009/Proposed_Sessions
• http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/2009/Reviewing_and_Voting

The organization and scheduling of the talks and speakers was done via the FrOSCon conference system (Pentabarf), which made it very easy to perform this task and also made sure that the OpenSQL Camp sessions were included in the main conference program. Below is a full list of sessions at our subconference (see the FrOSCon Program page for abstracts, speaker info, links and slides). We had two cancellations by speakers on short notice, but were able to cover the gaps with ad-hoc presentations. I'd like to send a special thanks to Geert Vanderkelen, who gave a great presentation about MySQL Cluster despite the very short notice and some technical difficulties at the beginning!

• Sheeri K. Cabral: A Better mysqltuner (Video)
• Linas Virbalas: Bringing Master/Slave into the 21st Century using Tungsten Database Clustering (Video)
• Holger Klemt: Firebird - a really free database used in free and commercial projects (Video)
• Seppo Jaakola: Galera Replication (Video)
• Kristian Waagan: Getting acquainted with Apache Derby (Video)
• Stephane Combaudon: Minimizing data access with covering indexes
• Lenz Grimmer: MySQL High Availability Solutions (Video)
• Jan Kneschke: MySQL Proxy: a MySQL toolbox (Video)
• Felix Schupp: New kid on the block: The BlackRay Data Engine (Video)
• Vladimir Kolesnikov: PBXT: Technology trends that affect your database (Video)
• Panel Discussion: The OSS Toolshed Shootout (Video)
• Darren Cassar: Securich - MySQL user administration and security made easy!
• Giuseppe Maxia: Sharding for the masses (Video)
• Geert Vanderkelen: An introduction to MySQL Cluster

Most talks attracted between 20-50 attendees and we had a great mix of topics from several different database projects (with a slight majority of MySQL-related talks). The Panel Discussion (moderated by me), called the "OSS Toolshed Shootout" went quite well and the speakers had a good time answering questions on various topics about their projects. Thanks again to all OpenSQL Camp speakers for making this event a success!

All in all I think that both FrOSCon and OpenSQL Camp were well worth supporting and attending - we were able to provide insight and trigger some interesting discussions among the OSS enthusiasts and developers in the audience. It was also a good opportunity in get in touch with many people of other OSS communities, fostering the MySQL (and other Sun OSS projects) ecosystem.

Here is a Flickr slide show of my own pictures - more photos can be found in the FrOSCon Gallery and the links page on the Wiki.

I personally look forward to next year's FrOSCon - a Big Thanks to the organizers for another great event!

Some time ago I posted a compilation of applications and programming languages that provide an API to connect to the MySQL Server. As it turned out, I forgot a few that I would like to mention here:

• Apache DBD API: a MySQL driver for mod_apr_dbd is not included in the official distribution, but can be obtained seperately from here. Some distributions (e.g. openSUSE) actually provide installable packages of this driver module.
• GRASS MySQL driver: The MySQL database driver in GRASS enables GRASS applications to store vector attributes in a MySQL server. Alternatively, data can be stored in an embedded version of the MySQL Server.
• HDBC: HDBC provides an abstraction layer between Haskell programs and SQL relational databases. This lets you write database code once, in Haskell, and have it work with any number of backend SQL databases.
• libdrizzle: This is the client and protocol library for Drizzle and MySQL that provides both client and server interfaces. A number of APIs (e.g. Java, Lua, Perl and Ruby as well as Python) have been built on top of it, but I'm not quite sure if they all support the MySQL client/server protocol as well.
• MySQL Connector/Python: MySQL Connector/Python is implementing the MySQL Client/Server protocol completely in Python. This means you don't have to compile anything - the MySQL client library doesn't even have to be installed on your system.

Do you know of any other MySQL Connectors/APIs? Let me know!