After our late night April Fool's dolphin stunt last week, I got roped into doing an early morning video shoot to preview some of the upcoming items for next week's MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara. I did this on about 4 hours sleep and so I look a bit like Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica, but hopefully less conflicted and not as sleezy. Through the miracle of video editing they made me look semi-coherent, though some things about new storage engines and row-based replication ended up on the cutting room floor. There's a ton of new stuff coming... READ MORE

We will be having a Memcached Hackathon next tuesday the 15th, starting at 8:30. We have commandeered a BOF at the MySQL User's Conference and will be running the hackathon till late.

Current topics of interest:
Binary protocol for libmemcached
Storage Interface from Toru Maesaka

Discussions on #memcached on Freenode to set other agenda items.

BTW You do not need to be registered at the conference to come.

opentaps 1.0.0 Released

Last week, we officially released opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM version 1.0.0. This version marks a significant step forward for opentaps. Since the release of 0.9 nearly two years ago, opentaps has matured into a full-featured ERP and CRM suite with role-based applications designed for the sales force, customer service, warehouse, purchasing, and finance and accounting departments. We have greatly improved the usability of opentaps since the earlier versions, created a free online documentation site for it, and built a more solid foundation of automated tests that would allow us to deliver a higher quality product going forward.

A Unique Platform
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So, as I said before, I will be at the MySQL Conference next week.  I am renting a car this year so I don’t have to wait on cabs or deal with them at all.  So, I am mobile and being from a modern Southern US city, used to driving 30 minutes just to go to dinner.  So, where should we go?  Anything good in San Jose?  Should I go all the way to San Francisco?  I am willing to go where ever.  Help me locals, you are my only hope!

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Yes, the open-source database market is still relatively small (roughly $200 million in 2007, according to Gartner). But when The Wall Street Journal starts paying attention (subscription required), it's clear that the opportunity is huge. The Journal doesn't get paid to be sentimental.

Regardless, as Arjen Lentz opines,

...(D)isruptive technology tends to not take over the incumbent's market, but find or develop a completely new market, and indeed take over in that space. The question then is, does the incumbent's market remain intact, or does it change/evolve naturally and perhaps shrink or even completely disappear …

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Brian Aker has found general agreement with his post: "The Death of Read Replication".

Arjen Lentz says "I think Brian is right...", and Frank Mash confirmed: "what Brian says about replication, caching and memcached is very true".

Just like Video killed the Radio Star it looks like maybe Memcached killed the Replication Hierarchy!

But of course, Brian and others are talking about replication for scaling reads.

In my session on PBXT next week at the conference I will be talking about how we plan …

I’ll be following closely the progression of Storage Engines available in the MySQL Database server, well soon to be available when 5.1 gets to GA (hopefully by end of Q2 which is what we have been told). Tick, Tick, time is running out.

PrimeBase XT (PBXT) and Blob Streaming is obviously my clear focus, actually now working for PrimeBase Technologies, the company which I want to note for people is an Open Source company, committed at providing an open source alternative to the other commercial players. You also have at the MySQL Conference talks on the the existing InnoDB from Innobase (a subsidiary of market RDBMS leader Oracle). There is a …

Google has just announced their alternative to Amazon’s s3 called ‘App Engine’. 

I think that if this is successful it will provide a shift in some of the basic web development economics and practices, even more than Amazon’s s3 has.

why?
- Small hosting providers (ones that offer a shell account for $12/month) will be marginalized. why pay for something when you get it for free?

- M&A. It will create a 3rd platform to develop on. you currently have LAMP and Windows. The google app engine provides a 3rd. The major difference is you can’t buy it. If we acquire a company who runs on this platform we have 2 choices. continue paying google for the infrastructure, or redevelop it onto LAMP. of course this suits google as their integration costs are lessened. Google might provide a ‘open source’ version of their infrastructure.. but I doubt it.

- …

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend yet another WebMontag session in Nürnberg this time. Somehow I'm getting a taste for it. The venue this time was not a concert hall, but a meeting room at NIK (de), an organization helping businesses and start ups (it's more than that really). Free drinks, beamer, and a good crowd!
The show started at 18:00 and people were already discussing stuff. I thought I was to late, but at 18:45 we started with a welcoming speech and going around the big table so everyone can introduce himself.

The first presentation by Tobias Lampe was about a new idea: …