1. Membase -- an open-source (Apache 2.0 license) distributed, key-value database management system optimized for storing data behind interactive web applications. These applications must service many concurrent users; creating, storing, retrieving, aggregating, manipulating and presenting data in real-time. Supporting these requirements, membase processes data operations with quasi-deterministic low latency and high sustained throughput. (via Hacker News)
2. Sergey's Search (Wired) -- Sergey Brin, one of the Google founders, learned he had a gene allele that gave him much higher odds of getting Parkinson's. His response has been to help medical research, both with money and through 23andme. …

A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation at the Apache Lucene Eurocon in Prague. It was a good conference focused on Lucene/Solr open source search technology and sponsored by Lucid Imagination.  

I've posted the bulk of the presentation below.  (I omitted a couple of slides that were MySQL specific.) Even though it was a technical conference, I got positive feedback from the attendees and organizers that the information was useful in helping folks think about where to focus their efforts.  

The slides have been posted to Box.net and are shown using their new "embedded preview" feature which is pretty cool. …

I promised in last week's post on "How to Kill Good Ideas" to follow up with some ways that more constructively help create new ideas.  The first of these is taken from an idea by Mats Kindahl's post of two other ways to kill ideas. Without further delay, here they are...

1. Make it safe to contribute ideas
   The best way to do this is encourage risk taking and acknowledge that some ideas will fail and that's acceptable.  The people I know who are the most creative are also the most prolific when it comes to idea generation.  And some of those ideas are, objectively speaking, total crap.  But there are so many good ideas generated in the process, it really doesn't matter.
2. …

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After Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle, there has been a large amount of discussions in the business and developer community on the future of MySQL community involved in its development.

A Community Fork?

Interestingly, MySQL community has been able to create a new Database by a fork from the public branch and has revived the project as MariaDB.

On it’s website, AskMonty.org [founded by Michael “Monty” Widenius, the founder and creator of MySQL] states that its aim is,

To provide a community developed, stable, and always Free branch of MySQL that is, on the user level, compatible with the main version. We strive for total interoperability with both our own, and our upstream, communities.

…

 
 I'm an advisor, investor and board member to several startup software companies including Revolution Computing, Pentaho and most recently Erply a new Software as a Service (SaaS) company.  One of the common threads I look for is the opportunity to disrupt a large market.

One of the things that made MySQL successful was its use of open source technology to disrupt the multi-billion dollar database market.  In Silicon …

I attended a panel session at the South by Southwest Interactive conference recently on the topic of high-tech startups in Europe.  The panel included Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL, now at Eucalyptus), Resham Sohoni (CEO of Seedcamp), Peter Robinett (Bubble Foundry) and Felix Petersen (Nokia).  It was interesting to learn about some of the initiatives, like Seedcamp, which are investing in and promoting startup companies like Erply, and Codility coming out of eastern europe. These companies are small, but they have big ambition and are leveraging open source and cloud infrastructures to keep their costs low.

…

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2010-02-20 through 2010-02-24:

• Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey of Nearly 1,600 CIOs Shows IT Budgets in 2010 to be at 2005 Levels
  Virtualization tops the technology priorities.
• Cisco Offers Three-Year, Zero-Percent Financing to U.S. Small and Medium-Sized Businesses -> Cisco News
• Marc Alff's blog: Performance schema overview
  Really interesting stuff for MySQL developers.
• …

As usual, Michael Skok of North Bridge ventures will be presenting the results of the annual Future of Open Source survey at this year's OSBC conference, March 17-18 in San Francisco.  This is a great opportunity to weigh in and provide your perspective on some important business questions. Here are the 2009 Results as reported by Ostatic.

• Survey: …

LinuxTag is the most important place for Linux and open source software in Europe. Last year, LinuxTag had over ten thousand attendees, and over 300 speakers. This year, the 16th LinuxTag will be June 9-12, 2010 at the Berlin Fairgrounds in Germany.

LinuxTag seeks exciting and suitable proposals for presentations in the conference tracks. The Call for Papers ends today.

I am proud to be a member of the LinuxTag Program Committee. Although a lot of proposals have already been submitted, there are some topics missing that I’d personally like to see covered. So, if you’re up for a last minute submission, get your inspiration from the following list:

• Is/was the recent economic crisis an …

If the MySQL site (including documentation) isn't working for you, try a mirror site.

"But," you ask, "how do I know what the mirror sites are if I can't access the site?"

Great question! Technocation has a mirror site (updated daily) at http://technocation.org/mirror/mysql/.

Also, we have purchased www.mysqlmirrors.com which points to the official list of mirrors at http://technocation.org/mirror/mysql/downloads/mirrors.html.

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