Zak Greant is running a free event this year parallell to OSCON that should be very valuable to anyone who is trying to get a start in Open Source or looking to start an Open Source project:

The project is called FOSSCoach and it is the successor to OSCAMP (the
Barcamp-like event that OSCON hosted for the last few years.)

FOSSCoach is focused on teaching people the skills that they need to
participate in (or start) distributed online projects - like PHP or
Wikipedia. Participation is free and people don’t need to be signed up
for OSCON to get in.

The event is meant to provide a way for OSCON to better serve the broad
FOSS community in Portland and surrounding regions.

Details on the event live at in a wiki at:

…

I got an early start. Too early. But I’m from the west coast, so my body thinks I slept in. I wandered around a bit, took a few pics which you can see at my Flickr OSCON set, and I discovered a couple of things that might be of interest:

• The starbucks in the conference center charges over $2 for a small cup of joe. There’s a starbucks right across the street (you can see it from the breakfast area - seriously, it’s 5 seconds away), and they charge less than $2 for a medium (grande). That’s less than I pay at home.
• The ATM outside the starbucks charges $3 for cash. I’ll report back when I find a cheaper one, but most places seem to take plastic here.
• Every computer involved in this conference, from registration to the video screens that dot the common areas, are running Windows XP. Just sayin’.
• The …

In Bangalore, India? Definitely go there, to the MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology, on the 29 of July 2008, from 4-7pm (no, not Indian Standard Time ;)), and listen to Kaj Arno speak about MySQL.

We’re on the front page of Sun Microsystems .in

In addition to Kaj, Thava Alagu will speak about contributing code to MySQL, and Sonali Minocha (from OSSCube) will speak on optimising enterprise applications.

There is also hope that this will be a regular meetup, aka the Bangalore MySQL User Group. Amit Saha has an entry on MySQL Camp (which …

One of the new features introduced by MySQL 5.1 is row-based replication.

Unlike the classic statement-based replication, used in MySQL up to version 5.0, row-based replication transfers the data instead of the statement used to create it.

If you want to have a taste of row-based replication, you can do some experiments with MySQL Sandbox.

First, we create a sandbox of circular replication with MySQL 5.0

./make_replication_sandbox --topology=circular --how_many_nodes=3 \
/path/to/mysql-5.0.51a-YOUR_OS.tar.gz

cd $HOME/sandboxes/rcsandbox_5.0.51
./n1 -e "create table test.t1(i int)"
./n3 -e "insert into test.t1 values (@@server_id)"
./use_all "select * from test.t1"
# server: 1:
i
101
# server: 2:
i
102
# server: 3:
i
103

This is statement-based replication at its best.
…

Ever since Sun acquired MySQL the rumours have been rife that Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL core team member and Sun’s PostgreSQL lead, would soon be heading out the door.

Josh has now confirmed that he is indeed leaving Sun, but before the doomsayers start writing of Sun’s PostgreSQL support business completely, Josh also notes that Peter Eisentraut is joining the team as PostgreSQL software engineer. Peter has also confirmed his new role.

From the MySQL team, Kaj Arno does the hellos and goodbyes. Losing Josh is significant for Sun’s role in the PostgreSQL community but the quick appointment of Peter indicates that …

This blog entry is about a specific storage engine in MySQL. The Federated storage engine enables data to be accessed from a remote MySQL database on a local server without using replication or cluster technology. When using a Federated table, queries on the local server are automatically executed on the remote (federated) tables. No data is stored on the local tables.

When we released MySQL 5.1.24, the Federated engine was not compiled in, pending decisions on our future steps. The reason for the removal was that we realised (albeit quite late in the game) that Federated has some bugs that expose the server to unnecessary risks. Fixing these bugs is a time consuming process, because the root cause lies in the design of the Federated engine.

The removal was a safety precaution, which made the server more secure. However, it also deprived some users of an engine that they had been using for some time (Federated was …

The keynote presentation for the 2008 Open Source BI Summit put on by Sun is available online now. I've embedded it below. A PDF is also available for download from Slideshare. Share and enjoy. Here's the informal description:

The enterprise software market is in the midst of a major structural shift.
Open source is a change in the conduct of the market – it’s not about ideology.
If we understand why this is happening, we can figure out how to respond.
The firms that develop a strategy to deal with the new market realities and open source will be the ones who make money.
The others, not so much.

Going Open: The Perils And Promise Of Open Source BIview …

In about 20 minutes I leave for the airport, arriving tonight in lovely Portland, OR to attend OSCON.  This will be my third appearance there and I look forward to listening, learning, being interviewed and podcasting.  In fact it was at last year's OSCON that I kicked off my foray into the wild and wacky world of podcasting.    A year later I've got over 70 under my belt and am looking to grab a few more.

What to look for 

As I mentioned previously, Dalibor will be giving a talk and as Ken points out, Sun will be having its "coach potato" …

In about 20 minutes I leave for the airport, arriving tonight in lovely Portland, OR to attend OSCON.  This will be my third appearance there and I look forward to listening, learning, being interviewed and podcasting.  In fact it was at last year's OSCON that I kicked off my foray into the wild and wacky world of podcasting.    A year later I've got over 70 under my belt and am looking to grab a few more.

What to look for 

As I mentioned previously, Dalibor will be giving a talk and as Ken points out, Sun will be having its "coach potato" …

Trying to catch up a bit on Ruby/Rails/JRuby related news...