Reminders work. At least on me. I try to Get Things Done (TM) efficiently, but slips do happen. And when they do, reminding me has a good chance to influence my priorities. I hope I’m not alone in this fallibility.

And therefore I want to remind you that you’ve still got two weeks to reply to our Call for Participation in the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California on 20-23 April 2009.

A few items to remember:

• We have plenty already, but we’re looking for more proposals. It does make our selection process harder (that’s when the Program Committee sits down and asks itself “what’s right for the conference and its participants”), but that’s a task that we are happy to work on.
• The theme of the conference is “Innovation …

You may recall that I was enthusiast about a Astronomy, Petabytes, and MySQL at the MySQL Users Conference 2008, and with reason. The engineers at Stanford have a plan of storing petabytes of data into a cluster of MySQL databases.
The technical …

If I look at Planet MySQL, I see plenty of movement. New projects, new releases of old projects, people trying exciting technologies, others combining old technologies with new platforms. And yet, some of the people who are posting these exciting news are …

I have always considered MySQL as the best model for open source companies. Their approach to the market, the execution of different business models, their relation with the community or the way their work internally as a virtual organization have shown an innovative and successful example of how an IT company in the 21st century can be managed.

The agreement with Sun, announced last January, was the crowning point of all the efforts put in the company since the beginning, proving the success of their innovative model. Since then I have been trying to put some order in my ideas about their model and summarize them in a few blocks that could serve as a quick guide to emulate their success. I discussed my ideas with Henrik Ingo, a friend of mine …

About a month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun to try to stop the competitive impact of ZFS on their business.

I can understand why they're upset - when Linux first came on the scene in Sun's core market, there were some here who responded the same way, asking "who can we sue?" But seeing the future, we didn't file an injunction to stop competition - instead, we joined the free software community and innovated.

One of the ways we innovated was to create a magical file system called ZFS - which enables expensive, proprietary storage to be replaced with commodity disks and general purpose servers. Customers save a ton of money - and administrators save a ton of time. The economic impact is staggering - and understandably threatening to Net App and other proprietary companies. As is all free innovation, at some level. …