(Credit: Matt Asay)

I've known Steve Pearson for a year or two, and have always been blown away by how aggressive his company, CBS Interactive, has been with adopting open source. MySQL, Linux, Spring, Lucene, etc. etc. The list of open-source projects that CBS Interactive deploys is long.

Why? Why does CBS Interactive use open source? According to Steve:

• Speed of development (rapid prototyping);
• Ease of access (Access to the code as well as documentation);
• Expandability (Ability to contribute back to the core product);
• Cost.

Steve went on to describe three projects that it has moved to open source. It turns out that the company's adoption of open source has evolved over time, based on bad experiences with proprietary software (and its vendors). CBS Interactive replaced and revamped its content management system with open source. It runs its David Letterman …

The FederateX Pluggable Storage Engine for MySQL, version 0.3 has been released. This release contains a fix for bug #21583 which will allow FederatedX to better handle UTF8 (thanks for patch from Tetsuro Ikeda). I had to also add logic to "real_query" to not attempt using values that are not yet defined until get_share is called (such as table->s) since real_query is now used at "ha_federatedx::create" to check if a foreign data source exists in the first place. I also added a "support_files" directory which will contain useful files such as configuration files for running two servers (testing) and any good information which can be added to help users have an easier time running FederatedX. Another thing I've also started is some sort of test framework for running tests on pluggable storage engines. I always found MySQL's test framework with "mysql-test-run.pl" and miscellaneous …

I recently got this email from a reader on my site and since I haven't posted for a while, I thought it might be a good discussion:

Jay,

I've been reading your site and had a question that you might have good insight for.  

I'm working on a high-traffic website that includes forums.  All the code is custom PHP, including the forums, simply because the PHP BB software out there doesn't scale as large and as well as I wanted.  I've implemented heavy memcached usage, distributed databases, etc. to handle any level of growth we may hit.

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I recently got this email from a reader on my site and since I haven't posted for a while, I thought it might be a good discussion:

Jay,

I've been reading your site and had a question that you might have good insight for.  

I'm working on a high-traffic website that includes forums.  All the code is custom PHP, including the forums, simply because the PHP BB software out there doesn't scale as large and as well as I wanted.  I've implemented heavy memcached usage, distributed databases, etc. to handle any level of growth we may hit.

read more

Good things come in threes, as EnterpriseDB confirmed today. The company today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series C round, including backing from IBM. With $37.5 million in funding to date, EnterpriseDB isn't hurting for cash.

This, however, has not been EnterpriseDB's primary problem. It's not cash that it has lacked, but open-source cachet. Its story of "Oracle performance and interoperability at a fraction of the cost" is a winner, but it was muted by its lack of a compelling open-source story.

That just changed.

...

Last week I blogged about the upcoming MySQL Users conference, in particular about the Writing MySQL UDFs tutorial that I will be delivering.

I will also be doing the Grand Tour of the Information Schema and its Applications.


I will discuss the elements in the MySQL information schema, and provide tips to write queries against it. Most of the talk …

While this year’s OSBC event has actually started yet, the big news on day one looks set to be EnterpriseDB’s announcement that IBM has joined existing investors in a $10m Series C funding round (EnterpriseDB also announced its new Postgres Plus strategy and the open sourcing of GridSQL).

IBM’s investment in EnterpriseDB is particularly fascinating given how rare it is for the company to make venture capital-style investments and also given the dynamic between IBM, Sun and Oracle. IBM usually chooses to support startups indirectly through its …

EnterpriseDB just raised $10M in Series C financing. IBM joined the list of investors including Fidelity Ventures, Valhalla Partners and Charles River Ventures. To date, EnterpriseDB has raised $37.5M (compared to the $39M that MySQL had raised in total after Series C). EnterpriseDB uses the slogan "The Oracle-compatible database company". While I wish Andy and the folks at EnterpriseDB the best, the challenge is that Oracle's high end products aren't in danger of losing to OSS competition. Next, in the majority of Oracle deals, Oracle isn't selling a database anymore. They are selling a database, an application server, tools and... READ MORE

Point your browsers to forge.mysql.com.

• MySQL Forge is the directory for projects related to MySQL.
• New MySQL functionality under work is described on the Forge Worklog.
• New Forge 2.0 features includes site-wide search, commenting and voting.
• Forge 2.0 hence sports ranking of projects.
• Forge 2.0 has a new people section with profiles and listings of contributed tools.
• The tools section is a code and tool repository for smallish code snippets.
…

64 bit MySQL (5.0) is now integrated into OpenSolaris. It will be available in build 87. 64 bit should work with 32 bit generated data-files and vice versa, although MySQL recommends you to do a full dump and reload, at least in production.

To enable the 64 bit server in SMF do:

% svcadm disable mysql:version_50
% svccfg                                               
svc:> select mysql:version_50
svc:/application/database/mysql:version_50> setprop mysql/enable_64bit=true
svc:/application/database/mysql:version_50> quit
% svcadm refresh mysql:version_50
% svcadm enable mysql:version_50

Also check out the latest Netbeans 6.1 beta with integrated MySQL support.