The SingleStore Forums are seeing more and more community contributions – not just timely and incisive questions, but answers from the community, and valuable content contributions as well. We have two new community stars for the summer, and some valuable Q&As flying back and forth.
What Makes an Online Community Work?
Participation in any online community is mostly optional. People always have a lot of ways they can spend their time, so for an online community to take off, it has to offer a lot to people.
So it’s notable that the SingleStore Forums are seeing more and more answered questions, and solid contributions, from customers and users – while SingleStore employees continue to help out as well.
The Forums are also important to a key SingleStore initiative, offering free use of SingleStore for small and, in our humble opinion, even medium-sized deployments. Only Enterprise users have direct access to SingleStore’s highly regarded, responsive support team, so the Forums are a crucial source of help.
Summer Community Stars
The first Community Star, named in June, and featured in a previous blog post, was Ziv Meidav. Now we have a second, and a third Community Star.
The July Community Star, Brandon Vincent, has all the tools needed to play the game, as they say in baseball. Not only does he dig in to help other users with complex technical questions; he recently posted an important piece of documentation, the excellent Columnstore Key Guidelines. Covering both shard keys and columnstore table keys, the Guidelines have a lot of important answers – and a couple of in-depth questions as well.
The August Community Star, Mani Gandhi, is part of the broader SingleStore community, out beyond the Community Forums. Mani has amassed more than 14,000 karma on Hacker News, a good chunk of that while making insightful comments about SingleStore. (Do go read his posts, but don’t upvote him because of this reference, as Hacker News frowns on that.)
Fun on the Forums
There’s a lot of serious stuff on the Forums, of course – discussions of potential errors in a SingleStore Pipeline, a question about GROUP_CONCAT sorting (coming soon, in SingleStoreDB Self-Managed 7.0), and a question and answer about unwanted increases in memory usage.
However, one has to wonder if the question and answers about using SingleStore as a plagiarism detector are entirely serious. Probably, but someone should double-check the question and answers to see if they’re all entirely original.
School’s Back In
As school goes back into session, and summer winds down, we expect things to get more business-like again – and to see an uptick of activity on the SingleStore Forums. See you there.
