Valleywag reports that Monty Widenius has quit Sun. The Pythian Group reckons its true. Kaj Arno’s non-denial denial would appear to confirm it despite his protestations otherwise.

“Technically there is no resignation letter. However, I spoke to Monty yesterday, and yes, resignation is an option he considers,” writes Kaj before expanding on some of the reasons that Monty might consider leaving Sun and how the MySQL project would continue without him (or without him as an employee at any rate).

He concludes: “In summary, I can neither confirm nor deny the rumour. But I hope my posting has shed some light on the …

There are many times when I needed to find out my outgoing (or external) IP for the servers which are behind load balancers or firewalls.  I used to just login to another external server from the server in question and find out by looking at “who” what my external ip is.  Even though it works and I am so used to it, today I decided to figure out a more graceful way of finding my outgoing ip.  As most of us already know, whatismyip.com is the quickest way to find out your outgoing ip from the browser.  So I decided to use the same way on the servers.  So I issued a wget:

wget http://www.whatismyip.org

Well that does the trick.  But being lazy as I am, I did not want to have to cat the output file to find out the ip (plus there is no point of creating extra files and doing extra work to remove them).  …

I finally got around to reading this update from Red Hat about Spacewalk, the open source version of Red Hat Network Satellite, launched in June.

Other than the progress in attracting participants and patches, the interesting news is that PostgreSQL support is being added after being demanded by the community. The roadmap confirms that work on support for PostgreSQL is scheduled to begin in mid-October.

The Path to PostgreSQL page, meanwhile, indicates that the idea will enable Red …

JasperSoft’s business development director Andrew Lampitt has kicked off his new blog with an interesting post related to business models used by open source-related vendors.

In it he attempts to define the approach utilized by the likes of JasperSoft and SugarCRM, which offer open source products with core functionality, as well as commercial extensions. The approach is a twist on the dual licensing approach made famous by MySQL* where the vendor, as copyright holder, makes the code available under both the GNU GPL and a commercial license for customers that would rather avoid the GPL.

The approach taken by JasperSoft et al is not to segment by user base but by features. As Andrew explains, “the commercial license is a super-set of the open source product, i.e., it offers premium product features that you will not see in …

I'm back home from DrupalCon 2008 now - it has been a great event! I met a lot of nice people from the Drupal Community and learned a lot about this CMS. I've been very busy in uploading the remaining pictures from the event to my gallery - so here's for your viewing pleasure:

• Impressions from Szeged
• Day One - 2008-08-27
• Day Two - 2008-08-28
• …

Continuent is probably best known for its database clustering technology for MySQL, as well as PostgreSQL, but the company has for some time had its sights set on expanding beyond open source databases and enabling horizontal database scalability.

It has just taken a major step towards delivering on both counts with the launch of Tungsten, its new stack of open source middleware technologies designed to enable low-cost databases to scale horizontally for database failover and continuity.

Tungsten includes includes Sequoia, the existing …

Hello and greetings from DrupalCon 2008 in Szeged, Hungary!

We (Thierry Manfé, Scott Mattoon and myself) are having a great time manning our booth and talking about Drupal, MySQL and Open Source@Sun with the nice crowd of Drupal Users and Developers here. Sun is a gold sponsor of the event and we're giving a number of sessions as well.

Today I gave my first presentation about MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices - unfortunately I ran a tad bit out of time at the end... The slides have already been attached to the session page, so you can read up on the last few things I was going to talk about. Feel free to contact me, if you have further questions!

Tomorrow I'll be talking about …

I have a small EC2 instance running with a 25GB EBS volume attached. It has a database on it that I need to manipulate by doing things like dropping indexes and creating new ones. This is on rather large (multi-GB, millions of rows) tables. After running one DROP INDEX operation that ran all day without finishing, I killed it and tried to see what was going on. Here’s the results of the first 10 minutes of testing:

-bash-3.2# dd if=/dev/zero of=/vol/128.txt bs=128k count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
131072000 bytes (131 MB) copied, 0.818328 seconds, 160 MB/s

This looks great. I’d love to get 160MB/s all the time. But wait! There’s more!

-bash-3.2# dd if=/dev/zero of=/vol/128.txt bs=128k count=100000
dd: writing `/vol/128.txt': No space left on device
86729+0 records in
86728+0 records out
11367641088 bytes (11 GB) copied, 268.191 seconds, 42.4 MB/s

Ok, well… that’s completely miserable. Let’s try …

A couple of articles have been published recently that point to a growing realisation/admission about the role that open source will play in the future of enterprise software.

In “The Commercial Bear Hug of Open Source” Dan Woods details the various methods by which open source has become increasingly commercial in recent years, while in “The Microsoft-Novell Deal and Trust in Princes” Bruce Byfield discusses the relationship between business and open source.

Neither article is perfect. Woods, in particular, appears to paint open source in the role of the glorious failure - failing to surpass traditional licensing models and being subsumed into the mainstream (a subject …

We are hiring!  dealnews is looking for a full time systems administrator.  The developers have been sharing the sys admin load for over 10 years now.  But, we really need a dedicated person now.  If you are interested, see our jobs page.