I happened upon this old LinuxJournal article about how the University of Zululand in South Africa used MySQL and other Free Software to make do with a 128 kbit (and later 768 kbit) internet connection for their staff and students.

This made me remember the trip I made to another African country, Burkina Faso, 15 years ago:

With the huge amount of work and numerous difficult obstacles facing my work on the MariaDB project, it can be …

In the Autumn, I wrote about some experiments I did using KVM and virtual machines to build and test MariaDB binary packages on a number of different platforms. In the period since then I added some polish and refinements, and the system is now running well for some time. We build and test packages for Debian (4 and 5), Ubuntu (8.04 to 10.04), Centos 5, and generic Linux; amd64 and i386 architectures.

To better control the startup and shutdown of the virtual machines, I created a small wrapper script around KVM called runvm. This wrapper encapsulates the steps needed to boot up a virtual machine, run a series of commands inside it, and shut it down gracefully afterwards. Some special care is taken in the script to ensure that the …

The Planet MySQL has been abuzz with opinions for or against the acquisition of Sun (and in particular MySQL) by Oracle, but I do not have a strong opinion to chime in with in support of either groups. The reason is that I do not know anything about antitrust laws, which is the legal basis for the EC blocking or not blocking the deal; and also I do not know what the alternative is to Oracle buying the MySQL part of Sun.

However, that does not mean that I can not join in the speculations about Oracles reasons for wanting MySQL in the first place ;-)

I think it is basically a matter of obtaining control over MySQL.

The horror scenario for Oracle is that MySQL (or Postgress or another Free Software program) does to the proprietary databases what Linux has done to the proprietary Unixes. Which is essentially to kill them, slowly but surely. This is not an …

I have now published the Buildbot configuration file that we use for our continuous integration tests in our Buildbot setup. Every push into main and development branches of MariaDB is built and tested on a range of platforms to catch and fix any problems early (and we also test MySQL releases before merging to easily see whether any new problems already existed in MySQL or were introduced by something specific to MariaDB).

The configuration is included in the Tools for MariaDB Launchpad project.

Now, the Buildbot configuration file is not something that most …

One of the things that I am really happy about in MariaDB is that we have our releases available as apt (and yum for Centos) repositories. This is largely thanks to being able to build this on the OurDelta package build infrastructure (which again builds on things like the Debian packaging scripts for MySQL).

Something like the Debian apt-get package system (which is also used by Ubuntu) is one of the major innovations in the Free Software world in my opinion. Debian has spent many years refining this system to where it is today. Want to run the mysql client, but it isn't installed? Just try to run it on your local Ubuntu host:

    $ mysql
    The program 'mysql' can be found in the following packages:
     * mysql-client-5.0
     * mysql-client-5.1
    Try: sudo apt-get install <selected package>
    -bash: mysql: command not found

Installing …

Most of this year I have been working on the MariaDB project. So it is interesting to look back and see what has been achieved.

For those that do not know, MariaDB is a project to create a community-oriented branch of the MySQL code base. We want MariaDB to be developed for the community, by the community, and driven by the needs of the community.

Turns out that a lot has been achieved already:

• We have had three releases (and a fourth is being prepared currently). The code is getting close now to release candidate.
• We have apt-able (and yum-able on Centos/RHEL) repositories for the releases. These are based on the OurDelta infrastructure (scripts, build machines, etc). This means MariaDB installation and upgrade can be done the prefered way using the built-in package …

I am giving two lightning talks at Open Source Days on October 3-4. One on improving database I/O performance using clustered indexes with MySQL/InnoDB, and one on advanced profiling with OProfile.

Hope to meet up with a lot of people there!

Vores røde ananas-æbler står utroligt flot her en sensommer-eftermiddag:

Jeg holder meget at træer. En af grundene er, at træer tager tid. At plante et æbletræ er at planlægge mange år frem i tiden. Og ingen forventer, at et træ kan vokse op på få måneder eller år. Det giver en ro at arbejde med træer.

God software tager også tid. Linux, Apache, Perl, Emacs, GCC, det er alle projekter som også fandtes for mange år siden mens jeg stadig gik på Universitetet. Selv KDE er snart 12 år gammelt.

Jeg tror at en vigtig faktor i de mange Open Source successer er, at man har taget sig tid til at gøre tingene ordentligt. Jeg har alt for tit oplevet, hvordan manglende forståelse for hvor lang tid softwareudvikling tager har kørt gode projekter af sporet (og ikke kun indenfor proprietær software, se bare MySQL 5.0/5.1).

The second half of last week I attended the Red Hat Summit and FUDCon which Sun and MySQL were silver sponsors of.  The events were co-located at the Hynes convention center in Boston. 

Although both events featured an impressive list of topics and tracks, other than the keynotes I spent the majority of my time meeting and talking to people.   One of my goals was to figure out how Sun can better work with Fedora to get more of our software into their distro. 

A few key Fedorans: Max Spevak, Dennis Gilmore, Tom "Spot" Callaway, Jeremy Katz, Paul Frields, Jesse Keating. 

President and CEO Jim Whitehurst chats with Fedora board member, Karsten Wade, …

The second half of last week I attended the Red Hat Summit and FUDCon which Sun and MySQL were silver sponsors of.  The events were co-located at the Hynes convention center in Boston. 

Although both events featured an impressive list of topics and tracks, other than the keynotes I spent the majority of my time meeting and talking to people.   One of my goals was to figure out how Sun can better work with Fedora to get more of our software into their distro. 

A few key Fedorans: Max Spevak, Dennis Gilmore, Tom "Spot" Callaway, Jeremy Katz, Paul Frields, Jesse Keating. 

President and CEO Jim Whitehurst chats with Fedora board member, Karsten Wade, …