eulogy for mysql forge
When the mysql librarian closed, I didn’t think too much about it; it was a feature I probably never used. However this month brings the end of the mysql forge. The MySQL Forge was something I worked on while I was at MySQL so I am a little sad to see it go.
Now for a little bit of a history lesson. We wanted some kind of “forge” back in 2005, because sourceforge was all the rage then (today, you can’t even find mariadb or mongodb listed there). We didn’t want to pay the exorbitant fees associated with sourceforge, so we investigated gforge. After studying it carefully, it would only allow us to use postgresql and changing the database structure for a rapidly developing piece of code wasn’t going to work for us; and we loved eating our own dogfood (mysql).
This meant writing our own code, and thus was born the mysql forge. We requisitioned two machines (forge1, forge2) of which I cannot remember the configuration of now. The only component we didn’t write was the wiki (we used mediawiki). What did we write? The interface to worklog (which looks like it stopped being synced in august 2011), a place to share tools & code (some 288 snippets, UDFs, scripts, etc.), and a project list (which is what the forge provided – over 400 projects that have relation to working with mysql). And the wiki had a chunk of documentation (over 600 pages).
We launched the forge sometime in april 2006, probably at the mysql users conference 2006. Apparently since then the wiki alone has had 11,236,211 page views. We hacked the wiki quite a bit, and upgrades were always a little bit of hell, but things like single sign on, SpamBlacklist, etc. had to work.
It seems like the new community resource is just that: community resources. There doesn’t seem to be a link to the new worklog, so its difficult for the community to comment on future worklog entries. The wiki is now hosted at oracle wiki’s, and it doesn’t look like all the content made it. For example I don’t see documentation for the random query generator anywhere… And what about all the code snippets even if the project list has gone?
All in, it was great to work on code with jay pipes, lenz grimmer, dups, and the feature driver giuseppe maxia. One regret was never having opensourced the code behind the forge.
Goodbye MySQL Forge. You served the community well for over five years.
