Matt Asay writes today about the prospects for open source vendors going public or, more likely, being acquired, and wonders whether open source vendors should “hold out for an IPO” or “capitulate” and be acquired.

The latter seems far more likely, especially in the current economic climate. We have written before about the open source vendors most likely to go public in the next couple of years.

Looking at the list of contenders again it is easy to imagine that they could all be snapped up before they make it public thanks to the fact that 1) open source vendors are very attractive investments 2) it is difficult for open source vendors to build the momentum to do so.

I spoke recently with …

I recently spent 3 hours pulling my hair out trying to fix a MySQL stored procedure that wasn’t working as expected. I’ve boiled the ultimate problem down to a simple example below. Can you spot the problem?

# First, let's create some sample data
CREATE TABLE TrendicsTest (
DateTime DATETIME NOT NULL,
Value INT NOT NULL,
UNIQUE KEY DateTime (DateTime)
);
INSERT INTO TrendicsTest VALUES ('2008-01-01 01:00', 1);
INSERT INTO TrendicsTest VALUES ('2008-01-01 02:00', 2);

# Next, lets' define a stored procedure to query the sample data
DELIMITER |
DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS summarizeTrendicsTest|
CREATE PROCEDURE summarizeTrendicsTest(dateTime DATETIME)
BEGIN
SELECT @endDateTime := DATE_ADD(dateTime, INTERVAL 1 HOUR);
SELECT * FROM TrendicsTest WHERE DateTime=@endDateTime;
END;
|
DELIMITER ;

…

First of all let me start off saying that I learned a lot of Capacity Planning from two people. Jozo Dujmovic, and John Allspaw-who by the way is coming out with a book.

Capacity != Performance. You may have the capacity to do a bubble sort but a bubble sort is still a bubble sort.

Really to Scale you need to know when your application will break. I have a tool set to help determine what application is producing what SQL and use that to figure out which SQL is producing the most load on the system. Some common tricks I do is put the execution path automatically as a SQL comment, then sample the FULL Processlist to build a graph on what application, function, SQL pattern is the top load.

On top of that I use Ganglia to trend the use of each mysql …

As last year, MySQL will host three Customer Conferences in Europe. They will take place at the following dates and locations:

• Thursday, October 23, 2008: London, UK
• Tuesday, October 21, 2008: Munich, Germany
• Wednesday, November 19, 2008: Paris, France

The content differs slightly per location, but there will be sessions in two parallel tracks on a wide range of topics, including success stories from customers as well as talks on very technical/practical topics. Here are some excerpts from the agenda for the UK Event:

• Delivering Web 2.0 Applications with MySQL and …

The german print magazine Technical Review features two MySQL articles in his latest issue 09/2008. Kaj gets interviewed on the question what the future plans of Sun are with regards to MySQL. And I give answers to five technical questions on MySQL and upcoming features.

(...)
Read the rest of In the (german) Press: Linux Technical Review 09/2008 on MySQL (87 words)

The german print magazine Technical Review features two MySQL articles in his latest issue 09/2008. Kaj gets interviewed on the question what the future plans of Sun are with regards to MySQL. And I give answers to five technical questions on MySQL and upcoming features.

(...)
Read the rest of In the (german) Press: Linux Technical Review 09/2008 on MySQL (87 words)

The german print magazine Technical Review features two MySQL articles in his latest issue 09/2008. Kaj gets interviewed on the question what the future plans of Sun are with regards to MySQL. And I give answers to five technical questions on MySQL and upcoming features.

The german language teaser of the two articles reads as follows:

Kaj Arnö steht Rede und Antwort Was hat Sun mit MySQL vor? Der Vice President of Community Relations und MySQL
Ambassador bei Sun im Interview.

Fünf Fragen zu MySQL. Wohin sich MySQL technisch entwickelt und welche Neuerungen in nächster Zeit zu erwarten sind.

The Technical Review is a bi-monthly magazine published by Linux New Media. Linux New Media also publishes the german language print …

One of the first days of OScon this year, while I was sitting in the Speaker's Lounge, I met Randal Schwartz, and told him about Drizzle. It turns out that, in addition to hacking and teaching Perl, he does a podcast FLOSS weekly, and wanted to interview Brian about it. So I hooked the two of them up.

Here is the resulting interview.

People are asking me if Percona will support Drizzle and what is in general our position regarding this project.

First about Support. We surely will support the customers if they select to run the Drizzle instead of MySQL Server. For us it is same as supporting MySQL Server with custom patches, which we do. In general our Support Policy is very open ended - we would support wide variety of systems, and we’re just being open about our experience with such system and ability to help if need arises.

Will we Recommend Drizzle ? We recommend what makes sense to the customers. If MySQL is not the best choice for the customers we’ll be open about it. Drizzle will need to prove it stable and being better fit for certain group of customers and we will recommend it it in such cases. It is …