This blog post was inspired by Masood Mortazavi's comment: "OSCon to be somewhat disappointing this year -- many low quality sessions and a celebration of forks"I did not attend OSCON, even though I live in California. I did not even bother to submit a presentation proposal, even though people who attended my talks at the MySQL Conference and Expo earlier this year and the year before, all

At least since early 2006, at the MySQL Athens meeting where I first met and listened to Jim Starkey, I have been of the firm conviction that log structured databases will be the future for disc-based storage devices. Their largely sequential write pattern ideally suits modern drives which are optimized to write whole tracks of data at a time. I even proposed such a project to Monty and Brian at

It is not always easy to scale Drupal -- not because Drupal sucks, but simply because scaling the LAMP stack (including Drupal) takes no small amount of skill. You need to buy the right hardware, install load balancers, setup MySQL servers in master-slave mode, setup static file servers, setup web servers, get PHP working with an opcode cacher, tie in a distributed memory object caching system like memcached, integrate with a content delivery network, watch security advisories for every component in your system and configure and tune the hell out of everything.

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I came home very tired yesterday, just walking around as a big MySQL billboard and I left with mixed feelings really.

First feelings were Happiness + Anger (=Love??). I had a nice dinner with Bruce and Magnus (PostgreSQL) on Thursday, met others at their booth and attended a few talks both Saturday and Sunday. I'm interested in their stuff, I do like PostgreSQL, just like probably everyone else in MySQL. But, I got very angry about 2 remarks made in the DevRoom: "MySQL loses data" and the infamous and idiotic "MySQL has no transactions". FFS! The latter was corrected on the spot, that REALLY pissed me off (remark made by non-PostgreSQL crew btw).
Anyway, overall, I did like what I was hearing, the project is going well, and lots of cool stuff coming in! Very nice! Funny thing though: "Who's using Partitioning?", one guy (as far as I could see) put up his finger.

Next feeling: Amazed! Drupal! I don't like PHP, bah, …

This is more venting my frustration over installing Postfix on a new (xen)box (old 1U VALinux finally crashed, blablah..).

I have been putting days, if not weeks into trying to figure out how to make Postfix with virtual users work together with Amavis and Spamassassin so it filters out to the Spam maildir of users.
Now, some will say: oh, that's peanuts. You take Courier's Maildrop and off you go.. Maybe I'm stupid with this, maybe, but it took me far less headaches and an hour (+ burger + pint in the bar) to get Dovecot 'deliver' figured out with Sieve.. and it actually works!

What I have now working on my Ubuntu Feisty server is:
* Postfix with virtual users using MySQL 5.1 (duh)
* Amavisd going through new email using Spamassassin (still have to figure out how to add the X-Spam header)
* Using Dovecot's deliver tool instead of this .. #!@$#$.. maildrop thing.. (no offense)
* Sieve …

Note. The following is my own opinion. Yes, I mention my employer. But keep in mind that I'm just writing my own opinion about my employer.

Have you read this?
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/30/esr_interview.html




People who do what the GPL tries to prevent (e.g., closed source forks of open source projects) wind up injuring only themselves


Eric, I don't think you understand what the GNU GPL represents. It protects us from corporations absorbing the project into itself. If MySQL the software was licensed under the BSD license, MySQL the company would have no reason to contribute back to the original source.

After a while, MySQL the …