There is a natural fit between university students and researchers and the open source community. They are smart, educated, short of cash, and want to make the world a better place; and some of them, at least, have plenty of spare time.

More seriously, open source projects are a great platform for software research. By starting with a mature software platform, the researchers can spend less time recreating existing functionality, and get to the new, interesting stuff faster. The findings of such projects are more applicable to the real world because the new ideas have been tested in realistic architectures and on data sets of a reasonable size. In the area of spatial (GIS) applications alone, there are several projects, including the work of …

There are many virtualization options available to MySQL users.  One of these is the baremetal hypervisor, which is installed directly on the hardware and eliminates the need for a primary operating system.  Baremetal hypervisors are extremely flexible in that multiple operating systems can be supported on one system while increasing overall server utilization since multiple environments can run on one system.  Additionally, most enterprises see more flexibility over their environment and resources, higher levels of availability and security, increased efficiency, ease of migration, improved manageability, and a total lower cost of ownership.   Sun xVM Server falls under the baremetal hypervisor category.  My colleagues in Israel, Adina and Orgad, are helping us determine the best practices for running MySQL within xVM Server. 

For those of you who don't know much about Sun xVM Server, it is a …

Have you looked at virtualization for your MySQL environments yet?  If so, I'd like to hear about it-- what technology are you using, what benefits have you seen due to virtualization, and have you encountered any downsides or limitations?  For those who haven't explored virtualization, why not?  Once again, I'd like to here about?

Continued from Part 1

Q: But, we digress... so let me instead ask you the question everyone asks me when they hear about Apache and MySQL on a mobile phone: Why on earth would anyone want to do THAT?

Because we can:)

No seriously, there are good reasons. If we assume that it makes sense to run a web server on your mobile (see further down for reasons for that) and the web-server you use is Apache, then it's quite obvious that you also want to provide both PHP and MySQL. After all, some 40% of all web-sites in the world are powered by (L)AMP, so if you provide the same environment on the mobile, you have hundreds of thousands of developers who are familiar with the stack.

But, in my mind, there are also compelling reasons to have a proper database on the mobile. Currently, the way …

If that was too cryptic, here's the news: we've extended the deadline on the Call for Papers for the upcoming MySQL User Conference which will be held April 20-23 in Santa Clara CA.  You've got until Nov 5 to get your proposals in. 

If you want to increase your odds of being accepted, here are some tips:

• Make it technical, but accessible
• Include both theory and practice (e.g. here's what we did and why)
• Clearly identify who your talk is for (e.g. developers, DBAs, …

The MySQL 5.0 Developer and DBA exams are back. One of our engineers, Toru Sugihara, has done an amazing job of going through the exams and greatly improving the translation. They will be available at Pearson VUE test centers starting the 28th of October. Gambatte!

The 2008 MySQL Conference Call for Papers is open until November 5th. Please contribute if you have something you want to share with the community. But is there anything you want to see from the MySQL Certification Team? Some of the material about MySQL certs has been done heavily in the years past but is it time to revive it? A half hour session about certification stats? A BOAF on building the MySQL Certified Community? Extended certification test hours? Tutorials on the new hands-on exams?

Let us known what you need and we will do our best.

Today I got back from Eindhoven (NL) where T-Dose 2008 was held in the Fontys University of Applied Science. A nice venue, some good talks, but not to much audience. However, it's was good to sync again with people there, and have interesting chats!

What I liked were the license and foundation talks. It's good to know more about the GPLv3 (which I don't like to much), and it's good to know how an association is build around an OpenSource projects. I also learned lots about CentOS, new OpenQRM stuff, and well.. few other things!

I hope my talk help too, it was about Monitoring MySQL, in and around it.

I'll be there again next year!

It was fun, the good part about T-Dose is that is small enough to actually be able to speak with everybody you want to .. well almost .. there were still some people around I wanted to talk to but I didn't get the chance to . Specially Ber Kessels and Roy Scholten who filled in the gaps in the Drupal track. After my own talk I had to run to the other track so I could answer the tricky questions in our other talk about Open Source Monitoring Tools. And I never really made it back to the Drupal room. So Ber, Roy , next time you run into me I`ll buy you a Beer !

Anyway Pics are up (so Geert now finally has pictures of himself on stage)

Social event …

It just goes to show that code isn't the only way to contribute. Mike Shadle recently did some leg work the Drizzle world by not only fronting the domain cost for drizzle.org, but also in actually negotiating down the guy who owned it already. That being done, the time has come (if you're so inclined) to chip in and help defray Mike's out-of-pocket. The goal is to raise roughly $1000 USD to cover the domain + Escrow costs. I've already said I would contribute a chunk of that. Please include in the PayPal description your full name/company/whatever identifying information you'd like and if you'd like it recorded, and I will record it and if the Drizzle guys wish, we can post your info on the [not established yet] website as a Drizzle supporter. If you've got an extra few buck lying around, please feel free to …

SmugMug , a photos and videos publishing site, goes into Production on Open Solaris + MySQL + ZFS. Check out this story on why a Linux geek decided to move his site from Linux To Open Solaris.

Don MacAskill, chief geek and CEO of SmugMug says"  ZFS is the most amazing filesystem I’ve ever come across. Integrated volume management. Copy-on-write. Transactional. End-to-end data integrity. On-the-fly corruption detection and repair. Robust checksums. No RAID-5 write hole. Snapshots. Clones (writable snapshots). Dynamic striping. Open source software. " He is also excited about the CoolStack 5.1 stack available in Open Solaris along with …