The year is almost at its end. Looking back at the past year I think it was a good year for MySQL. The 5.6 release was released in February and has been proven to be a very good release. There were many folks who reported bugs, which is good as this means they care about the product. But MySQL is not only a product, its a large ecosystem. One of the big players in the ecosystem is Oracle and this year they really participated in the MySQL community by having their engineers attend conferences which were not organized by Oracle (Like Percona Live and FOSDEM).
This year I couldn't attend the MySQL Connect and Percona Live conferences, but I hope to be able to attend in 2014 again. I did attend FOSDEM, which is a really nice (and different) conference.
For MariaDB it also was an interesting year as a number of Linux distributions and customers switched from MySQL to MariaDB (and sometimes back again). I wonder what 2014 will bring for MariaDB.
The TokuDB storage engine was released as opensource this year.
The Galera replication system did get quite some attention this year and saw a 3.0 release.
I think 2014 is going to be even better for MySQL as the 5.7 release already looks great and Fabric looks promising.
Have a safe an fun new years eve! I'm going to eat an oliebol!
