Domas Mituzas (who works for MySQL AB and works with Wikipedia) has published a workbook (pdf) about about the design and architecture of Wikipedia.

Expect to see lots of common infrastructure tools used in common across sites like Livejournal, Digg, etc.

Basically, everyone is using about the same core technology:

Started as Perl CGI script running on single server in 2001, site has grown into distributed
platform, containing multiple technologies, all of them open. The principle of openness
forced all operation to use free & open-source software only. Having commercial alterna-
tives out of question, Wikipedia had the challenging task to build efficient platform of freely
available components.

Pasha Sadri from Yahoo gave the final keynote presentation at the mySQL conference on his work with Yahoo Pipes. He began his presentation talking about problems he was having grinding through craigslist and other RSS feeds to extract useful information. He thought about how he could build something that solved similar problems for others trying to do the same kinds of things.

Pipes is a RSS mashup tool that allow you to combine RSS feed and apply transformations on the data and create a new feed. If you haven’t seen it, you ought to check it out. Several good technical reviews here, here and …

LinuxWorld has a good (and flattering :-) post on Alfresco and the rise of open source Enterprise Content Management that is faster, more usable, and a heck of a lot cheaper than traditional proprietary ECM.

But ease of use should not be underestimated as a key driver in Alfresco's, and other open source applications', growth. Who cares about technology that no one knows how to use?

Terry Barbounis, CTO at the Christian Science Monitor, answers:

Content management technology, in general, has been something to be desired for sometime now, Barbounis says. “Systems are just not easy enough to use and as a consequence customers either don't use them or get little value from what they do,” he says. “ECM when properly leveraged can stretch …

Thanks to everyone who attended the talk in person.

The slides used in the talk is available at ZRM for MySQL wiki

If you have questions or comments, please send them to me.

I find Wal-Mart fascinating. Wal-Mart is a near perfect example of Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma," in many ways. The very things that have made it spectacularly successful are also causing its stuttered growth, as BusinessWeek captures in this illuminating article.

...[Wal-Mart's] fundamental business problem is that selling for less no longer confers the overwhelming business advantage it once did. Low prices still define the chain's appeal to its best customers, the 45 million mostly low-income Americans who shop its stores frequently and broadly. But the collective purchasing power of the "loyalists," as Wal-Mart calls them, has shriveled in recent years as hourly wages have stagnated and the cost of housing and energy have soared.Even if this pool of low-income "loyalists" were flush with cash, Wal-Mart still has to …

Unfortunately, I had to skip out on my presentation at this year’s MySQL Conference.

Thankfully, my friend Mike Hillyer was able to pinch hit for me. I had planned to do a podcast of the session, but - as he is totally awesome - Mike even recorded the session.

Real time. Roland has built a cool Pentaho application that collects data from MySQL performance tables and metadata views and shows reports on this performance, errors, etc. Cool stuff for DBAs.

Picture, total crap from the mobile

Google (likely thanks to the good work Chris DiBona is doing there) continues to build momentum behind its open source activities. Its most recent contributions involve MySQL. I'm not geeky enough to understand their significance, but I appreciate the motivation:

Google uses the MySQL open source relational database internally for some applications that aren't search related. And its engineers are keen to improve the code by making their improvements publicly available.

"We think MySQL is a fantastic data storage solution, and as our projects push the requirements for the database in certain areas, we've made changes to enhance MySQL itself, mainly in the areas of high availability and manageability," said Google engineer Mark Callaghan in a blog post.

I like to see this kind of voluntary contribution - Google clearly …

Curiouser and curiouser....

IBM today announced a technology and marketing partnership that will have IBM selling MySQL's database, among other things:

The agreement calls for IBM and MySQL to develop software that will make MySQL compatible with programs that run IBM's System i line of business computers, including IBM's i5 operating system DB2 database. IBM will also sell MySQL's service products.Just when I thought IBM was getting stodgy and provincial in its views on open source, it does something like this. This is news because:

1. IBM's DB2 competes with MySQL, and

2. MySQL is GPL (though dual-licensed under commercial terms), and IBM has tended to be somewhat Apache-centric, its Linux (and Eclipse - yes, I know that IBM does more than BSD-style licensing) …

Years ago, I remember pontificating that open source would never touch the application market. Narrowly viewing open source through the prism of the day, I said things like this (to John Koenig at IT Managers Journal):

To date, enterprise-focused open source has been best in those areas of the software stack that have a broad (approaching universal) user population. Things like operating systems and browsers. When you have a population with the aptitude and interest in improving something (like the Linux kernel), there's simply no better way to develop it -- let users develop to what they want.

Open source works less well in applications that have a smaller niche of users. It's not that open source development communities can't do applications because we find FireFox, OpenOffice, and others, or that they can't do vertical market applications, because we …