My MySQL Sandalcamp proposal made the cut for the upcoming MySQL Conference. I hope that I will see some of you down in Santa Clara in April.

Version 1.1.4 of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL, a robust and
intelligent solution for backup and recovery of MySQL databases is available
for download at Zmanda downloads page. Changes since 1.1.3 release: * Support for aborting backup runs
* Support for character sets and stored routines
* Bug fixes Take a look at ZRM for MySQL user documentation for more information on how to install and configure it. Find bugs and report them at bugzilla (http://forums.zmanda.com/bugzilla). Feel free to contribute to ZRM for MySQL wiki and …

The following is what i wrote on “43people.com” about the boss. I thought it was worth keeping in my own archives, since it’s actually a story about my life as it pertains to Mr. Bezos.

Back a few years ago, I was taking some classes down in Edmonds. The one I’m thinking of in particular was on the care and feeding of unix. We were using red hat linux 6.0 or some crufty version that wasn’t so crufty at the time.

Anyway, the prof didn’t require that we buy any books, but he made some suggestions. And he also suggested that we buy them on this new fangled “Internet” thing through a few of his friends down south in Seattle at this place called Amazon.com.

And thus was my introduction to O’Reilly and Associates. I soon thereafter bought a book called “ …

So recently my wife and I bought a new ‘used’ car ….

The car came with the OEM CD changer. While the cd changer did the job it was not sufficient for me…..6 disc cd changers are so 90’s aren’t they???

So I started to research other options to replace the cd changer.

I wanted something simple that would be scaleable and most importantly, whatever I chose needed to Integrate into my current soundsystem which includes an on board GPS system. It also had to be relatively low cost.

So with these requirements, I set off to search for a replacement for my 6 disc CD changer…

I stumbled onto a Digital Music System. Which consists of either a 40 gb hard drive or can be upgraded to 80 gb or 120 gb.
I chose the 40 gb version. This hard drive can be connected to my PC at home and I can load 1/3
of my music collection onto this drive before filling it up. This system met all my other …

I was reading this morning, and came across a passage that really struck me: we are free to act, not to be acted upon. This jibes perfectly with what I've been reading in William James. Freedom is in action, not in waiting for others to act upon us.

In the open source world, many companies treat open source as a ball-and-chain to be endured (for the marketing benefits of saying they're "open source"), rather than as a tool that gives them essential liberties and advantages. Open source is a tool, even a weapon, for MySQL, Red Hat, and others. It's a cross to be borne by others. This is reflected in their licensing: open source, but not too much.

(Incidentally, this same phenomenon shows up in all aspects of software. …

Some people have been saying that MySQL will not provide any more binary releases for its Community users, and that from now on you’ll have to build from source or pay up. Say it ain’t so!

It ain’t so.

Yes, it’s true that MySQL 5.0.33-community is a source-only release. However, this does not mean that all future MySQL Community Server releases will be source-only! In fact, we are planning another (probably 5.0.35) Community release in the near future, that will include binaries that you can download from dev.mysql.com/downloads, same as always.

But don’t take my word for it, when you can read for yourself what Kaj Arnö has to say about it.

In …

Next week, backup experts from Zmanda, will present a webinar on how you can use ZRM for MySQL to backup your MySQL server remotely over the internet. If you are a ISP or host your own site, you would want to attend this webinar. For that matter, the infromation will be useful for any MySQL dba. This is a technical seminar where we will go through step by step of actually implementing the solution. We already published a detailed white paper on this topic. You can get to that white paper by registering with Zmanda Network.

Hope to see you at the Webinar.

I don't get it. I understand that Red Hat is a threat to operating systems companies everywhere, but I continue to find it highly ironic that its competitors proclaim cost savings for their customers...by shaving pennies from the least expensive part of the stack (the operating system).

Oracle did it with its "Unbreakable Linux." (Just picked up this shirt today, btw. Zack had it up on his blog and I thought it was too cool not to buy.) Oracle conveniently overlooked the fact that its database costs orders of magnitude more than the Linux the database runs on. If …

I had dinner with Fabrizio, a good friend and CEO of Funambol, the leading mobile open source company. He was in Salt Lake to ski and was kind enough to call me so that we could hang out.

Fabrizio said some things about open source that rang true with me, which I had not considered before. I'll list two principles he mentioned, and will discuss each in turn:

1. Don't upsell your community, and

2. Sell open source to those who don't like/trust open source.

At first glance, Fabrizio's principles fly in the face of most open source businesses out there. But when you scratch the surface of his thinking you see that it actually undergirds the most successful open source businesses. Let me explain.

Fabrizio's first principle - …

From Rishab's excellent report came a few graphics that I thought worth calling out separately from the report itself. It's interesting to see how Europe's adoption and usage of open source compares with the US'. Here are a few slides (from IDC and Optaros - its report is here [Registration req'd]) that depict the differences.

First, here are the open source applications most prevalently used in Europe:

Compared to the US, first large ($1B+) enterprises:

And then mid-sized companies ($50M - $1B):