Following the release of our report, ‘The Myth of Open Source License Proliferation’ and during research for it, we heard and sensed a feeling that open source software licenses had evolved to become a generally well-accepted piece of the the enterprise IT and IP market. However, we also heard from numerous vendors, developers and other individuals that the next battlefront is obviously software patents, which are in need of reform, according to many supporters of free and open source software.

This week, we saw some of the software patent skirmishes that are driving and validating this thinking. There was first news that the Open Invention Network, the consortium dedicated to legal and IP defense of Linux, had bought some software patents that related to …

Welcome to the 161st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs … and the first one under my penmanship.

MySQL

Johan Andersson explains in a very simple way the scenarios in which you may fall into a split brain situation and how to avoid it in MySQL Cluster on two hosts – options and implications. An article worth reading from one of the MySQL Cluster experts.

I love simple scripts that solve complex problems. I love it even more when the command line can be defined in an alias, and SQL from SQL offers some …

CodePlex, patents and Linux code. An interesting few days for Microsoft open source.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

CodePlex, CodePlex, CodePlex!
Microsoft launched the CodePlex Foundation to facilitate open source contributions, and confirmed the departure of Sam Ramji.

Patents, Patents, Patents!
The OIN confirmed the acquisition of 22 patents formerly owned by …

I have just released PBXT 1.0.09 RC3. Besides bug fixes (details in the release notes), this version includes 2 Beta features:

• XA/2-Phase Commit support
• Native online backup Driver

XA support has been around MySQL for quite a while, and we all know of it usefulness, for example when sharding. So I was surprised to find a bug in the XA recovery: Bug #47134. Contrary to what is reported, the crash can also occur when using XA with just the default engines installed, so watch out for that one (the good news: the bug fix is simple).

Online backup is really cool! I have heard that it may soon be released in a coming version of 5.4, so lets hope that this is true.

In a little test, I did a backup of a 10GB database in 49.26 seconds! …

The binaries for MySQL Cluster 6.3.26 have now been released and can be downloaded from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/6.3.html

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 6.3.26 (compared to 6.3.25) can be found in the MySQL_Cluster_6_3_26_ChangeLog.

The binaries for MySQL Cluster 7.0.7 have now been released and can be downloaded from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/7.0.html

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.0.7 (compared to 7.0.6) can be found in the MySQL Cluster 7.0.7 Change Log.

We’re supporting the OpenSQL Camp, which will be held in Portland on November 14.

One of my objectives for the camp is to make progress on a universal storage engine API, to make it possible to use the same storage engines in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ingres, or any other database. I’m also looking forward to hearing other people’s great ideas.

After OpenSQLcamp, I’ll be attending Supercomputing’09. Supercomputing and database hardware technology seems to be converging. Many of the fastest databases today look like a supercomputer with disks attached. Will there be other kinds of convergence? For example, what kind of convergence will we see between multicore computing and cluster computing? Today we program multicore machines very differently from clusters. I think in the future that difference will vanish.

I have just released a new version of the MySQL plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager — MySQL plug-in 1.1.1. This is a long overdue bug fix release.

There are no new features implemented (we have another branch in development) but just fixed number of fairly annoying bugs that I was finally able to reproduce.

The download link is on the plug-in’s home page where you can also find a data-sheet and installation guide.

Here are the changes in the 1.1.1 release:

• Tested with Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g Release 5 (10.2.0.5)
• Fixed the bug with connections not closed properly
• Fixed bug that caused collection to hang and time-out (Net::MySQL bug — not recognizing a final packet in …

For couple of months I have been writing middlewares for database shards, and today I made a presentation covering them.  It includes the following.

• Incline - a trigger and queue based distributed materialized view manager
• Pacific - a set of perl scripts to manage MySQL shards, a MySQL shard can be split into two in less than 10 seconds of write blocking (and no read blocks)
• DBIx::ShardManager - a client API for accessing database shards using Incline and Pacific

With these middlewares I think it is no more difficult to write web applications that runs on database shards.  In fact IMHO it is as easy as writing a webapp that runs on a standalone database.

The presentation slides are available from slideshare.  If you have any question or suggestions, please leave a comment.  Thank you.

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We’re supporting the OpenSQL Camp, which will be held in Portland on November 14. 

One of my objectives for the camp is to make progress on a universal storage engine API, to make it possible to use the same storage engines in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ingres, or any other database.  I’m also looking forward to hearing other people’s great ideas.

After OpenSQLcamp, I’ll be attending Supercomputing’09.  Supercomputing and database hardware technology seems to be converging.  Many of the fastest databases today look like a supercomputer with disks attached.  Will there be other kinds of convergence?  For example, what kind of convergence will we see between multicore computing and cluster computing?  Today we program multicore machines very differently from clusters.  I think in the future that difference will vanish.