By Giuseppe Maxia

The Data Charmer, a.k.a. The Wizard, is a free lance database consultant, with a long career in several IT fields. He is well known for his Perl and SQL expertise,although he is proficient in several other languages, such as C++, shell scripts, and Italian.

He has a split personality, one of which lives in virtual space and time, floating around UTC+1. The other (or the others, as there is a dispute about how many they are) is less documented and some people believe it to be fictional. He teaches Creative Biography at the University of Euphoria, CA (also known as Euphoric State).

G.M. Hello, D.C. Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. I'll start with a question that most people ask. Who are you?

D.C. This is not really a question I'm willing to answer. Besides, the answer would be misleading. In the Internet age, I can be several people at …

On January the 9th, 2009 I've presented at the 3rd Annual Gestionale Open Developer Conference. 

Gestionale Open is an open source ERP gathering interest in Italy, since it is compliant with local laws. This project has been started years ago by an entrepreneur with decades of experience in the field and now it's used by 100s of customers. They have concluded the porting to MySQL, which is now the default database for the product!

There were nearly 100 participants. Gestionale Open has catalyzed the interest of customers, distributors, software developers. It's nice to see complex business applications moving to open source.

The title of my presentation was: "Enterprise Innovation". I've chosen a banal title, but wishing to make an interesting dissertation on why MySQL is fuelling the innovation and who is using MySQL to seed projects and evolve from simple ideas to real business.

…

On January the 9th, 2009 I've presented at the 3rd Annual Gestionale Open Developer Conference. 

Gestionale Open is an open source ERP gathering interest in Italy, since it is compliant with local laws. This project has been started years ago by an entrepreneur with decades of experience in the field and now it's used by 100s of customers. They have concluded the porting to MySQL, which is now the default database for the product!

There were nearly 100 participants. Gestionale Open has catalyzed the interest of customers, distributors, software developers. It's nice to see complex business applications moving to open source.

The title of my presentation was: "Enterprise Innovation". I've chosen a banal title, but wishing to make an interesting dissertation on why MySQL is fuelling the innovation and who is using MySQL to seed projects and evolve from simple ideas to real business.

…

On January the 9th, 2009 I've presented at the 3rd Annual Gestionale Open Developer Conference. 

Gestionale Open is an open source ERP gathering interest in Italy, since it is compliant with local laws. This project has been started years ago by an entrepreneur with decades of experience in the field and now it's used by 100s of customers. They have concluded the porting to MySQL, which is now the default database for the product!

There were nearly 100 participants. Gestionale Open has catalyzed the interest of customers, distributors, software developers. It's nice to see complex business applications moving to open source.

The title of my presentation was: "Enterprise Innovation". I've chosen a banal title, but wishing to make an interesting dissertation on why MySQL is fuelling the innovation and who is using MySQL to seed projects and evolve from simple ideas to real business.

…

The "splendid effort" to create an application from scratch in 6 hours. They did not succeed, but what a …

The bursting of the internet bubble was good for the computer industry.

Many of us didn't like the medicine, but I can't remember a single customer upset at the idea of paying $20,000 for computing infrastructure that used to cost them $100,000. The price compression came from open source software, and a move toward general purpose servers, and resulted in companies formerly making 65% gross profit on products (Sun among them) facing a new reality.

But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Since then, Sun's built the biggest open source software business around (see this report for details), from platform software to application infrastructure (even a …

The rise of the "Open Source Software Stack" reached another milestone today.  

Sun released a SPECjAppServer2004 performance result using top-to-bottom Open Source Software stack components:  OpenSolaris/MySQL/Glassfish.   At 1197.10 JOPS, the performance is highly respectable - not setting any land speed records, but it is in the ball park with other results using the same class of hardware.   The difference (of course) is in the price/performance.

The other contenders were two [1][ …

It is widely acknowledged that Barack Obama put together the best minds and team together to run his campaign. One of the proof points is that his website www.barackobama.com was driven by MySQL! 

From Jonathan's blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/

" On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.

I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com. "

It is widely acknowledged that Barack Obama put together the best minds and team together to run his campaign. One of the proof points is that his website www.barackobama.com was driven by MySQL! 

From Jonathan's blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/

" On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.

I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com. "

It is widely acknowledged that Barack Obama put together the best minds and team together to run his campaign. One of the proof points is that his website www.barackobama.com was driven by MySQL! 

From Jonathan's blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/

" On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.

I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com. "