Read the original article at How to hire a developer that doesn’t suck

Strip by Randall Munroe; xkcd.com

First things first. This is not meant to be a beef against developers. But let’s not ignore the elephant in the living room that is the divide between brilliant code writers and the risk averse operations team.

It is almost by default that developers are disruptive with their creative coding while the guys in operations, those who deploy the code, constantly cross their fingers in the hope that application changes won’t tilt the machine. And when you’re woken up at 4am to deal with an outage or your sluggish site is costing millions in losses, the blame game and finger-pointing starts.

If you manage a startup …

Working with replication, you come across many topologies, some of them sound and established, some of them less so, and some of them still in the realm of the hopeless wishes. I have been working with replication for almost 10 years now, and my wish list grew quite big during this time. In the last 12 months, though, while working at Continuent, some of the topologies that I wanted to work with have moved from the cloud of wishful thinking to the firm land of things that happen. My quest for star replication starts with the most common topology. One master, many slaves.

It looks like a star, with the rays extending from the master to the slaves. This is the basis of most of the replication going on mostly everywhere nowadays, and it has few surprises. Setting aside the …

Since 2005, April has been the month for MySQL users to meet in Silicon Valley, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Traditionally, the conferences ended with an announcement of the dates for the following year. That was a good tradition.

For the last few years and with changing stewards of the MySQL product, uncertainty has been introduced into that process. Announcements have been delayed by months, main sponsorships have been unclear up to the last minute, and the basic decision on whether there will be a conference at all hasn't always been obvious, as key players and decision makers have shifted.

This is no different today, concerning 2012. Rumours prevail. The current MySQL steward pulled out for 2011, leaving O'Reilly as the main risk taker. With a competing event on the East Coast at almost the same dates, the ecosystem was left with confusion on which event to participate in. I belonged to the very few who went to both …

Read the original article at Scale Quickly Like Birchbox – Startup Scalability 101

One of the great things about the Internet is how it has made it easier to put great ideas into practice. Whether the ideas are about improving people’s lives or a new way to sell and old-fashioned product, there’s nothing like a good little startup tale of creative disruption to deliver us from something old and tired.

We work with a lot of startup firms and we love being part of the atmosphere of optimism and ingenuity, peppered with a bit of youthful zeal - something very indie-rock-and-roll about it. But whether they are just starting out or already picking up pace every startup faces the same challenges to scale a business. Recently, we were reminded of this when we watched …

Would you like to work with the biggest websites and social networks in the world? Do you want to support large enterprises with their database initiatives? Would you like to assist ISVs and OEMs providing the technology that powers their products?

In the MySQL Sales Consulting organization we do just that.

You’ll support MySQL partners, customers and prospects across EMEA, evangelize our products, assist marketing and cooperate with product management to shape the future of MySQL.

Sounds interesting? We're actively looking for senior professionals to join the team!
Feel free to reach me on LinkedIn for more information or have a look at the links below:

• …

As the dog days of summer set in and temperatures rise, this year’s O’Reilly OSCON conference in Portland, OR offered the open source community a brief respite from the heat. However, if you’re thinking the event lacked sizzle, think again. The energy, the discussions and the opportunities to collaborate, plus the chance to learn from/ interact with customers and potential customers, made OSCON one of the highlights of July.

While I’ve attended previous OSCON conferences while at MySQL AB, this was the first time I’ve attended as the CEO of SkySQL. My new role provided a different perspective, as well as new kinds of opportunities to interact with the open source community. There were plenty of terrific, formal presentations and Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, however, those from MySQL, MariaDB and Drizzle were especially noteworthy and informative. Here were a few high points:

…

Today at OSCON, SkySQL will introduce the SkySQL™ Recovery Manager.  Powered by Zmanda, the SkySQL™ Recovery Manager is the most advanced backup and recovery solution for the MySQL® database.  SkySQL’s solution makes life easier for any database administrator in need of a robust, yet flexible and easy to use backup and recovery manager.

With SkysQL Recovery Manager, you will be able to:

• Perform flexible backups
• Provide continuous data protection for you MySQL databases
• Backup live MySQL databases without affecting users or applications
• Perform one-click point-in-time recovery
• Centralize global backup management
• Perform fast backups of MySQL databases running in Amazon EC2®
• Maximize data security
• Monitor backup and recovery functions with automated alerts and reports
• Rapidly deploy your backup and recovery …

The primary objective of this release was to radically improve performance for subqueries, as well as for joins and single-table queries over large data sets. The MariaDB 5.3 release is based on MariaDB 5.2 (and therefor, MariaDB 5.1 & MySQL 5.1).

Noteworthy improvements in this release include:

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Today, SkySQL announced a partnership with Yoshinori Matsunobu, an Oracle ACE Director and the creator of the newly announced MySQL Master High Availability Manager and Tools (MySQL MHA) for automating MySQL master failover. With this partnership, SkySQL will be the first MySQL database commercial services company to provide technical support, professional services, and training, for MySQL MHA.

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Today, more and more proprietary software vendors are choosing to go Open Source. Doing this enables them to leverage the community benefits of Open Source, shorten the sales cycle, and gain a competitive advantage over other proprietary products.

However, for those firms considering a switch to Open Source, there are some hard decisions to make with regard to their product architecture. Should they provide only a single Open Source product, and earn revenue from add-on services like support and consulting (RedHat)? Or should they adopt the Open Core model, offering their product under both Open Source and proprietary licenses (MySQL)? Or …