This is a first entry on my new blog. Maybe the first statement can be just “First post!!!”, but I want to tell my potential readers why this blog was founded, what’s its purpose and what you can hopefully find here in the future.

The original reason to create this blog was to have some place where I can post my ideas about my work. I’m currently working as a package maintainer in SuSE and sometimes I’m facing some things that I think people should know about. But who reads mailing lists nowadays? If I’ll be good at blogging, I’ll be googleable and therefore these idea may actually find some audience. Well, other thing is that my first goal is to get aggregated on Planet SuSE, once this site will be finished enough.

While I was thinking about this stuff, I realized that this may be a good opportunity to create some personal pages about myself too. Well, everyone wants a little bit of attention and I’ll probably want …

About three weeks from now, Rickard Falkvinge (founder of the Pirate Party) will be kicking off the Vancouver Open Web Conference. He’ll be presenting a keynote on how, in just three years, a party with an odd name organized around a narrow electronic frontier platform has become the fourth largest political party in Sweden. It’s an amazing story that makes a good parable about how the world is changing and is a fitting start for a conference that we’ve (meaning mostly Jeff Griffiths, Malcolm van Delst, Mike Cantelon and Tim Whiteway) worked hard to make a careful balance of accessible, …

I’m pleased to announce version 0.6 of the Gearman C server and library. The major new feature of this release is a pluggable persistent queue for the job server. It comes bundled with a libdrizzle module (so your queue can live in Drizzle or MySQL), but Brian has already written a libmemcached module and there is a flat-file module in the works as well. The persistent queue allows background jobs to be stored via the pluggable module, so if the job server crashes or is shutdown, the queue module can repopulate the job server with any jobs that were not yet complete. This is just the first version of the queue support, so expect more modules and features in the future!

On a related note, James Luedke has also released version 0.3 of the …

The quality of MySQL 5.4.0 is very high for a beta product.
Four weeks after we released it as beta we have not had
any real serious bugs reported yet. There are some issues
due to deprecation of features, version numbers and a
bug in the SHOW INNODB STATUS printout and some concerns
with the new defaults when running on low-end machines.
It's also important as usual to read the documentation
before upgrading, it contains some instructions needed to
make an upgrade successful. The upgrade issue comes from
changing the defaults of the InnoDB log file sizes.

For those of you who want to know more about MySQL 5.4.0
and it's characteristics and why you should use it, please
join this webinar where Allan Packer will explain what
has been done in MySQL 5.4.0.

I’ve been to the Chicago MySQL meetups a few times at Uncommon Ground near Wriggly Field. Honestly I don’t think I gained much out of it. The few times I was there, the group was small, which is not necessarily bad. (In fact, a small group can even be a good thing.) But the thing got me was that there was too much talk, not enough action. I haven’t been to its meetings for a few years so I cannot comment on its state after I left.

When I think a user group, I think about fans getting together hacking stuff: demonstrating cool tips and techniques, dissecting a new technology such as MySQL proxy by a user who have done that and learned some hard lessons along the way with no marketing talk, discussing solutions to problems a user has, providing pointers and efficient scripts, etc. In such a setting, each member of the group takes turns providing his/her expertise. The presenter does not necessarily needs talking slides, but must prepare …

A software-based distributed caching system such as memcached is an important piece of today's largest Internet sites that support millions of concurrent users and deliver user-friendly response times. The distributed nature of memcached design transforms 1000s of servers into one large caching pool with gigabytes of memory per node. This blog entry explores single-instance memcached scalability for a few usage patterns.

Table below shows out-of-the-box (no custom OS rewrites or networking tuning required) performance with 10G networking hardware and one single-socket UltraSPARC T2-based server with 8 cores and 8 threads per core (64 threads on a chip). All runs are done with a single memcached instance and 40 worker threads so that about 3 cores (24 threads) are used for the critical networking stack that is also heavily parallelized. 40+24 threads is a nice balance for this …

A software-based distributed caching system such as memcached is an important piece of today's largest Internet sites that support millions of concurrent users and deliver user-friendly response times. The distributed nature of memcached design transforms 1000s of servers into one large caching pool with gigabytes of memory per node. This blog entry explores single-instance memcached scalability for a few usage patterns.

Table below shows out-of-the-box (no custom OS rewrites or networking tuning required) performance with 10G networking hardware and one single-socket UltraSPARC T2-based server with 8 cores and 8 threads per core (64 threads on a chip). All runs are done with a single memcached instance and 40 worker threads so that about 3 cores (24 threads) are used for the critical networking stack that is also heavily parallelized. 40+24 threads is a nice balance for this …

The two predominant forms of open source licenses are BSD and GPL. PostgreSQL is licensed under the BSD license , while MySQL is licensed under GPL . While the details are arcane, the business impact is significant, and that is what this post addresses.

The BSD (or BSD-style) License: This license basically says: ‘This code is provided as is, do what you want with it, and include this copyright in your resulting product.’

The GPL License: This license, also known as the copyleft license, essentially says: ‘This is free and distributed as source code, and any addition or extension must also be distributed under these exact terms.’

BSD essentially says I prefer open source code, so I’m making my source code open and freely available, but what you do with it …

When Oracle agreed to acquire Sun there was some speculation that Oracle might try to kill MySQL. First this wouldn’t be a very prudent effort on Oracle’s part and second it’s not even possible. I think Monty has the best explanation from his comment on his blog:

The simple fact is one can’t own an open source project. One can control it by controlling the people which are leading and developing it. When a company doesn’t take good care of their employees and those employees start to leave the company and work on the project elsewhere, that company has lost control of the project.

The whole comment is worth reading. Monty does a good job of putting the Sun purchase into perspective with regards to MySQL and the developer community.

“… when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” –Tony “Scarface” Montana

In the world of computing, first you get the users, then you get the applications, then you get the power. What do I mean by power? In a word “platform”. If the only way for users to get applications is through you, and the only way for application developers to get to users is through you, then you are a platform. If you continue to nurture and grow your platform, your company is immortal, it is a goose that will continue to lay golden eggs…as long as you continue to nurture it.

To get the users, you need to deliver immediate value. Once you achieve critical mass of users, the developers will start showing up, whether you want them or not. A good example of this was Myspace. They attracted so many users, that developers started providing extensions directly to users without Myspace’s …