A panel consisting of Brian Aker of MySQL, Rob Lanphier of Linden Lab, Stephen O'Grady of Redmonk, and Theodore Ts'o of the Linux Foundation gives some answers to the question, "Does Open Source Need to Be Organic?" This topic stemmed from a few posts by Ts'o a few months before OSCon.

From the official conference description:

there?s much more to a software project than just the license. Are software projects dominated by a single company still open source? Does a project need to be 'organic' to be truly open source? What does "organic" even mean in this context? Join us as we discuss these topics and more.

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Vores røde ananas-æbler står utroligt flot her en sensommer-eftermiddag:

Jeg holder meget at træer. En af grundene er, at træer tager tid. At plante et æbletræ er at planlægge mange år frem i tiden. Og ingen forventer, at et træ kan vokse op på få måneder eller år. Det giver en ro at arbejde med træer.

God software tager også tid. Linux, Apache, Perl, Emacs, GCC, det er alle projekter som også fandtes for mange år siden mens jeg stadig gik på Universitetet. Selv KDE er snart 12 år gammelt.

Jeg tror at en vigtig faktor i de mange Open Source successer er, at man har taget sig tid til at gøre tingene ordentligt. Jeg har alt for tit oplevet, hvordan manglende forståelse for hvor lang tid softwareudvikling tager har kørt gode projekter af sporet (og ikke kun indenfor proprietær software, se bare MySQL 5.0/5.1).

Recently I needed to quickly change charset on all tables and change each field’s chanset in each table in a specific database to latin1 and collation to latin1_swedish_ci. I googled a little and found this solution by shimon doodkin. I used it and it did work, but also it attempted to change charset at MySQL […]

One of the biggest problems I faced as a field DBA was defending my production databases against poorly performing SQL code. Talking to folks at the MySQL UC, during customer visits and trolling the MySQL forums/blogs confirms that this is a common problem and even more challenging when a performance problem pops up during times when no code promotions have taken place.

Traditional/popular way of finding bad SQL code
For MySQL DBAs the challenge to identify and isolate resource intensive SQL code is really two-fold; job #1 is to find the offending code (after that the chore becomes fixing it so it performs, but that is a topic for another post). Most MySQL DBAs have used the MySQL Slow Query Log ("SQ Log") at some point to help with job #1. For those not familiar, the SQ Log is enabled by starting MySQL with --log-slow-queries[=file_name] option. Once enabled the SQ Log captures queries that took longer than X seconds (user …

"The State of" Lightning talks, moderated by Josh Berkus, is always a great highlight.
OSCon 2008's speakers and projects included:

• Brian Aker: Memcached
  
• Glynn Foster: OpenSolaris
  
• OSI: Danese Cooper
  
• MySQL: Monty Widenius
  
• PostgreSQL: Bruce Momjian
  
• GNOME: Dave Neary
  
• Gentoo: Donnie Berkholz
  
• OpenOffice.org: Louis Suarez-Potts
  
• Jabber: Peter Saint-Andre
  
• Mozdev: Brian King
  
• OpenID: Scott Kveton
  
• Open Scrum: James Dixon
  
• Talking Book Project: Cliff Schmidt
  

Due to an equipment malfunction, I was able to get all the way through the Open Office lightning talk, but did not get the Gnome lightning talk. Please feel free to let me know about any others that did not make the video cut (or ones that …

JP just wrote in to let me know that the T-Dose 2008 CFP has been extended. So there is still time to send in your abstracts

Oh right .. I was expecting to much from you folks.

So lemme translate, Jean-Paul Saman, one of the T-Dose organizers, wrote me this morning to let the world know that he is still accepting proposals for talks at T-Dose , The Technical Dutch Open Source Event which will take place on 25 and 26 October 2008 at the …

JP just wrote in to let me know that the T-Dose 2008 CFP has been extended. So there is still time to send in your abstracts

Oh right .. I was expecting to much from you folks.

So lemme translate, Jean-Paul Saman, one of the T-Dose organizers, wrote me this morning to let the world know that he is still accepting proposals for talks at T-Dose , The Technical Dutch Open Source Event which will take place on 25 and 26 October 2008 at the …

In a lot of environments.

Peter gives a nice overview why you don't always need to invest in big fat redundant hardware.

We've tackled the topic last year already ..

Now I often get weird looks when I dare to mention that Raid is obsolete ..people fail to hear the "in a lot of environments"

Obviously the catch is in the second part, you won't be doing this for your small shop around the corner with just one machine. You'll only be doing this in an environment where you can work with a redundant array of inexpensive disks. Not with a server that has to sit in a remote and isolated location.

Next to that there are situations where you will be using raid, but not for redundancy, but for disk throughput.

The following maintenance jobs are typically run against a MySQL database:

• Backup
• Clean-up binary logs
• Optimize tables
• Purge query cache
• Rotate binary logs

Backup

A backup is not a typical maintenance job. But it behaves more or less like one. The backup should be done regularly depending on the restore/PITR (Point in Time Recovery) requirements.

Make sure, that in the backup all the necessary files (data files, transaction log files, configuration files and binary log files) are included. To prove that the backup process is working properly a regular restore should be performed. This can ideally be combined with the set-up of new database instances for developers or testing.

Clean-up the binary logs

The binary logs can be cleaned-up in two ways:

a) Passive by MySQL itself:

#    my.cnf

expire_logs_days    = …

Sun Microsystems founder and chairman talks about his current role and what keeps him and Andy Bechtolsheim engaged at Sun READ MORE