• at the MariaDB Dev Meeting in Lisbon, PT, arriving 2011-03-11 (Thu) late, and leaving 2011-03-14 (Mon) around noon
• at O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara between 2011-04-12 and 2011-04-15. I will arrive in SFO late 2011-04-08.

In early Oct 2010, GenieDB was invited to speak at Oracle Open World. We presented our ideas on why we used Oracle BDB as our back-end database layer. It’s a database jungle out there, and it’s been a vital design decision in our architecture to have a reliable and flexible persistent database. Fundamentally, using Oracle BDB we built in a replication layer and a consistency layer, which were essential to provide a fully replicated multi-master database with immediate consistency. GenieDB for MySQL offers a MySQL storage engine for MySQL that allows users to query the NoSQL storage engine via rich MySQL query capabilities.

Below is a high level, in-a-nutshell overview of the GenieDB’s software Architecture!

There’s been a recent rise in interest in “in-memory databases”. The reasoning given is that the cost of synching commits to disk is high, and this is the bottleneck in write operations; ACID databases require that a commit is confirmed written to disk – which often actually requires two or more disk writes, each with a seek penalty of a few milliseconds. Therefore, on-disk databases struggle to commit more than a few hundred updates per second, unless you invest in very expensively large RAID stripe sets.

Reads aren’t an issue, as every disk-based database does caching in memory. If your database is large enough to fit in memory, or access to it is mainly concentrated on a subset that’s small enough to fit in memory, reads are just as fast as any in-memory database. It’s writes that are the issue, and an in-memory database can update records

“When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of ‘gossip.’ She held a feather pillow and said, ‘If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That’s how it is when you spread mean things about people.’ For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.” — John Seigenthaler Sr.

So the future pulled up in her shiny big metaphor and we got in. In the beginning, our road trip made sense, all well-ordered highways and wholesome roadside attractions. Somewhere along the way, we hit bat

Gerv, Frank, Mark and I have been discussing ideas around how people can turn open source experience into an asset for their resume. We’ve got some of our own ideas, but we want yours as well. Please blog, comment, email or ‘dent any one of us, or catch up with Gerv and Mark at FOSDEM.

My top three tips for making the best of your open source participation are:

• Two days in Frankfurt, two days in Munderkingen and two days in Heidelberg between December 5th and 17th. Mostly just ordinary working and travel days.
• Visited Sandro Groganz of Init Marketing in Munderkingen. Worked from Sandro's house after a nice dinner on Sunday.
• Caught up with (and was interviewed by) Rory MacDonald of Init Marketing while he was vacationing near Ulm. The interview was focused on Mozilla and should go online in the new year on http://www.initmarketing.tv
• Visited Georg Richter of MySQL/Sun (http://www.mysql.com/) in

At the end of next month (July 2007), this blog (and actually the entire site) will go offline.

About eight months ago, I announced that I discontinued my work related to patent policy, but that I would keep this blog online for some more time as an archive of former postings. In the meantime, I became involved with football policy and confirmed that fact in this blog. Other than that, I have not made any new postings.

I am glad to see that there was still a significant number of downloads of my electronic book as well as visits to this blog. However, if a blog ceases to deliver news, it becomes somewhat pointless after a while, and that’s why this site will be taken off the net within a little more than month. There will be no further announcements: at some point around the end of July (or maybe in early August), the site will simply be

About six months ago, I discontinued my work in the area of patent policy and announced my reasons in this blog article. At the time, I had already mentioned the possibility of becoming involved with football policy. And that has actually happened: From early February on, I have been lobbying and campaigning again, independently but with the official support of Real Madrid, in Brussels and Strasbourg.

In late March, the European Parliament voted on a resolution on “the future of professional football in Europe”, and the European Commission is still working on a comprehensive

I have decided to withdraw definitively from the political debate on the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA). The process itself may very well take several more years, but I will not do any more lobbying nor make any more public statements in this regard.

This year I made a lot of effort to inform politicians, the media and the public of the shortcomings of the present EPLA proposal, and I had the chance to make my contribution in the build-up to the European Parliament’s October 13 resolution, but I kept rather silent in recent weeks and will not speak out on this particular issue again. Until there is a new patent policy process in which I might participate, I will not comment on any patent-related issues. Last year I returned to the fray after

I wish I could say that Europe is free from software patents, but it is not. In contravention of the existing statutory law, the European Patent Office (EPO) continues to bend and break the law every day by issuing European software patents. And if the EPLA were to be ratified in its current form or any form near the present proposal, tens of thousands of existing European software patents would become strongly enforceable overnight.

Earlier this year, the NoSoftwarePatents Award campaign started in order to draw attention to the EPO’s unacceptable granting practice. That award is not linked to the original

In today’s vote on its patent policy resolution, the European Parliament approved the compromise text I had previously reported on, but it also voted in favor of a few amendments.

The most notable amendment was number 7. It inserted the subclause “which address concerns about democratic control, judicial independence and litigation costs” into article 1. Two of those three concerns (judicial independence and litigation costs) had been mentioned by commissioner McCreevy in his speech in the EP on September 28. But it was a

In my most recent blog entry, I reported on the pretty reasonable compromise the three largest groups in the European Parliament have reached on the upcoming resolution on future European patent policy.

Meanwhile, Dow Jones has quoted Erika Mann MEP, a German social democrat who is very much in favor of software patents, as saying that the EP has, through this compromise, effectively “postponed” a decision on the EPLA. I would not contradict that assessment. The proposed resolution neither urges the Commission to drop its EPLA-related plans nor does it support the EPLA in its present form. It ends up saying very

In this blog I have repeatedly mentioned the European Parliament’s upcoming resolution on future European patent policy in general and the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) in particular. After a long and intense debate, which went mostly unnoticed by the general public, the three largest groups (international-level parties) in the EP - the conservative EPP-ED, the social democratic PES and the libertarian ALDE - yesterday sealed a pretty reasonable compromise.  Since those three groups have about 550 of the chamber’s 732 seats, it’s a mere formality for that compromise proposal to be carried by a solid majority. The vote will take place in Brussels on Thursday of next week (October 12).

Initially, the chief negotiators of EPP-ED and ALDE wanted the EP to say an unequivocal Yes to the Commission’s plans to

At the recent EuroOSCON 2006 conference in Brussels, I was both a keynoter and a session speaker. I have meanwhile uploaded my presentation slides for my keynote, New Innovation Models, Policy-Making and Lobbying, and for my additional speech, EU Software Patents Reloaded, to this Web site (as PDF files).

Unfortunately, there was some confusion on the part of the organizers, due to which I only had my slides available for the keynote but not for the session on software patents. The organizers had

Almost six months ago, I firstly wrote about the effect the EPLA could have on software patents in Europe in this blog entry. I reiterated this concern on various occasions, including the Commission’s July 12 hearing. Earlier this month I published a two-page diagram and a three-page briefing document to explain the nature of the problem.

My related concerns are shared by a growing number of people and organizations. Yesterday, the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament issued

Yesterday afternoon, the EU’s internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy spoke in the European Parliament’s plenary in Strasbourg. The speech and ensuing debate as well as the vote on a resolution of the EP that has meanwhile been scheduled for October 12, had been announced about a week before.

In his statement on future action in the field of patents, McCreevy conceded that the proposed European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) leaves a lot to be desired in its present form. Firstly he acknowledged the recent motions for a resolution filed by four groups in the European Parliament criticizing the

Klaus-Heiner Lehne, a German conservative MEP on the payroll of a leading patent litigation firm, is not amused at recent developments in the European Parliament, and in particular he is frustrated to see that other MEPs call for a more balanced approach to patent policy. Lehne much prefers commissioner McCreevy’s push for the EPLA, the Excessive Patent Litigation Agreement (the official long form starts with “European”, but “Excessive” would be more accurate).

The day before yesterday, Lehne vented his anger by issuing

Yesterday three groups in the European Parliament (PES, Greens/EFA, GUE/NGL) announced their motion for a resolution on patent policy. I published their press release earlier today on this Web site.

In parallel, the Independence/Democracy group in the European Parliament (commonly abbreviated as ID or IND/DEM) filed this motion for a resolution on patent policy. The motion was put forward by Tom Wise, an MEP from the UK Independence Party who spoke out in strong terms against the software patent directive.

The ID motion is

Three groups in the European Parliament (i.e., international-level parties) yesterday authorized me to distribute the press release below to my media contacts:

European patent controversy heating up again

PES, Greens/EFA and GUE/NGL groups in European Parliament file motion for resolution — Proposal calls for “balance between the interests of patent holders and the broader public interest in innovation and competitive markets” — Commissioner McCreevy’s preference, the EPLA, is seen as weakening EU democracy, increasing litigation costs and “exposing SMEs to greater

I fixed a couple of typos in my book No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union. Thanks to Marco Menardi for having pointed me to those typos.

I have previously reported in this blog how certain European politicians and patent bureaucrats are trying, once again, to give software patents a stronger legal basis in Europe. On 12 July, the European Commission held a public hearing in Brussels, and the European Parliament is shooting for a vote on a patent policy resolution toward the end of this month.

If you’d like to know why the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) is, among other bad things, a road to software patents, please have a look at this two-page diagram (PDF file). And if you’re subsequently interested in some more background information and facts, this three-page briefing document

As I explained in this blog, it’s always a difficult decision for me to keep postponing my own project in order to work on the patent policy front. But once again, like so many times before, I have decided to do so for some more time. Given what happened at the July 12 hearing, there are some important things to do right away. I’ll talk a little more about my personal future on some other occasion, but suffice it to say that I’m still actively involved in the European patent policy debate!

After I mentioned in this blog posting a week ago that I’d make an announcement on August 28 concerning my future priorities, I received different reactions. Mostly there seems to be a lot of understanding and appreciation for what I’ve contributed to the fight for balanced patent policy, and that’s great. But some people misunderstood my remark: the decision hasn’t been taken yet, and it’s not an appropriate point in time to say which outcome is more likely because a lot can still happen in one week. Come August 28, I’ll decide and announce.

What transpired from of the responses isn’t really a surprise: to many people I’m simply “Mr. NoSoftwarePatents” because that’s the context in which they first came to know me.

I just saw this article:
http://opensource.sys-con.com/read/261119.htm

It quotes from the personal (not corporate!) blog of Simon Phipps, Sun’s chief open source executive. The first time I heard Simon speak out on patents was in November 2004 at an FFII conference in Brussels. A couple of months earlier, I had criticized him in the forum of NoSoftwarePatents.com in a way that I later on regretted. Even though the NoSoftwarePatents campaign was highly successful, there are three or four things that I shouldn’t have said or written during those days, and what I said about Simon’s credibility has the top spot among that list of

On August 28 — i.e., in two weeks from tomorrow — the European Parliament will return from its summer vacation. You can find the EP’s calendar here: There are different color codes, and those days which have no color at all are holidays and vacation days.

While the EP is not the only EU institution, it’s clearly one of the most important ones, and its return marks the end of what is usually the slowest part of the summer season in Brussels. Upon its return, the parliament is going to take a look at patent policy again, and is in particular going to evaluate the outcome of the European Commission’s patent policy hearing that took place in Brussels on July 12. In late May, several

I just saw this article on how Linus Torvalds on the one hand and Hewlett-Packard on the other hand reacted to the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) second draft of its GPL v3 license.

Just like Linus, I, too, have said all along that digital rights management (DRM) is not categorically illegitimate and thus must not be ostracized as a whole. While Linus still seems dissatisfied with the FSF’s proposed GPLv3 in this respect, the aforementioned article quotes Hewlett-Packard (HP) saying that based on a preliminary analysis, there’s been a lot of progress on that front.

But the article also reports that HP wants the FSF to soften its stance on patents. I can only hope that the FSF will continue to stand firm on this issue. It’s obvious that certain

A couple of days before Wednesday’s European Commission hearing, I learned that Managing Intellectual Property magazine, the leading international magazine for IP owners which has more than 10,000 readers around the globe, renominated me to its annual list of the “top 50 most influential persons in intellectual property”.

The first time I appeared on that who-is-who list was a year ago, and ZDNet reported on that fact under the humorous headline “Anti-patent campaigner hailed as IP hero”.