Bruce Perens, the man who created the Open Source definition on February 9, 1998, writes about the past and present of Open Source. In his State of Open Source Message, he labels the past and the future of Open Source. In his own words:

"Friday, February 8 is the last day of Decade Zero of Open Source. Saturday, February 9 is the anniversary of Open Source and the start of Decade One. It's a computer scientist thing. We always start counting from zero :-)"
The article talks about the rise of Open Source from Red Hat to most recently Sun's acquisition of MySQL. He also re-iterates the need for non …

BCP stands for Business Continuity Planning - basically a fancy name to describe handling the situation when a DC goes offline. Since we use dual master replication for our servers - putting a master in another DC is not possible - without a special layer. The reason: A slave can have only one master, while a master can have many slaves. So, mysql replication for a dual master setup is not valid, unless there is a replication ring from one DC to another DC. You do not want to do this due to latency.

To get around these limiting factors in mysql, we have developed an application, using my design, to get write events from one DC to another DC over a stunnel.

To get data from one DC to another DC we need to do it encrypted. If there is a man in the middle, we don't want them sniffing our traffic-so we use stunnel to encrypt the data. I will not use SSL encrypted replication since managing that requires a mysql restart. For …

Over the past couple of days Sun has been getting a lot of feedback on it's behaviour with open source.

So there is Amanda McPherson trying to teach Sun that the L in LAMP really stands for Linux.

And then there was Roy T. Fielding quiting the Open Solaris community.
I'm still wondering why a company that once bought StarDivision because it was cheaper to buy the company than to pay licenses for similar functionality, keeps maintining their own kernel stack rather than contributing to one that is way more popular and as a much larger userbase.
Its not like they have a die hard community they will loose, it's not like they will loose customers over it. When Sun says that Linux is the new …

While posting about my talk on MySQL Cluster and Drupal I realized something very important about Open Source and how it differs from proprietary software.

Looking at a traditional software and infrastructure consultancy shop you will see that they carry a broad range of products which they care about and which they are actively offerering to customers. For this products they have formal arrangements with suppliers that will both give them licenses, support but also incentives to sell those licenses.

So when a sales guy or a consultant arrives at a customer they are already biased to plug a certain product, and they will try to convince the customer that the product they are selling is the right fit. Even tough when it's a total Misfit.

With the Open Source consultant he won't be plugging a product, he will be listening to his customer and will use the …

Recently we put together a consolidation benchmark to see how an open-source stack performs against the proprietary stack from Microsoft. Solaris, MySQL, and Sun Web Server running on the open-source UltraSPARC T2 processor were pitted against a Microsoft SW stack running on a 4-socket QC Xeon server. This benchmark highlights the continued trend to incorporate MySQL open-source databases and how it works under virtualization (Solaris Zones).

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 (1.4 Ghz UltraSPARC T2 processor) and Solaris Containers managing a consolidation of Open-Source Software components (MySQL Database and Sun Java System Web Server) provided 2.4 times better performance than the HP DL580 system (four Xeon quad-core processors) and a major virtualization software, Microsoft Windows 2003 Server EE, Microsoft SQLserver database and Microsoft IIS webserver.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 using the MySQL database in Solaris zones is …

So yesterday I presented my findings on MySQL Cluster (ndbd) and Drupal.

I`ll be writing them out in a more detailed document some day soon ..
But the short summary is that MySQL-Cluster and Drupal are not a good fit.
One has to realise that MySQL cluster isn't always a good solution and that every problem has it's own solutions. The nature of the tables of Drupal means that you need enormous amounts of memory.

I was a bit afraid that the present MySQL crowd woudln't really appreciate my findings, however I was wrong I got some good feedback from the present MySQL crowd , they too seem to want to promote the idea that Cluster is not a fit for every problem, and they were great help in answering some of the audience questions.

The presentation is here …

Recently, I came upon Baron Swartz's (xaprb's) great now_usec UDF:
http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2007/10/30/how-i-built-the-now_usec-udf-for-mysql/

I use an Intel Macbook Pro for my primary development environment. GCC on OS X has some interesting quirks. Usually to compile a UDF on GNU/Linux I use the following command line:

gcc -fPIC -Wall -I/usr/include/mysql -shared -o udf_now_usec.so udf_now_usec.cc

When I tried to execute the above on my OS X box, I got some errors:

$ gcc -fPIC -Wall -I../include -shared -o udf_now_usec.so udf_now_usec.cc
i686-apple-darwin8-gcc-4.0.1: unrecognized option '-shared'
/usr/bin/ld: Undefined symbols:
_main
___gxx_personality_v0</b>
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

The …

Fosdem is over .. and it was ... overcrowded :(

Honestly trying to squeeze into an overcrowded bar, then on saturday overcrowded rooms, or even not being able to enter that room (Mozilla and Embedded) , Fosdem is starting to become the victim of it's own success.

Some people are suggesting Fosdem to move to the Arenberg campus in "Brussels-East" dunnow if Leuven can actually host enough beds for Fosdem :)
However the Beer event problem would be solved but Philip will have to make arrangements with 'The greatest bar of Western Europe"

The talk about Xen on ARM was interresting however the grande finale missed, the MiniOS just didn't boot :( Kettle was interresting …

I haven't gotten any responses to my question from Friday, so I figured I'd post a more direct question:

The two variables 'innodb_pages_read' and 'innodb_buffer_pool_reads' are different.  'Innodb_pages_read' seems consistently higher than the buffer_pool_reads.  Certainly the buffer pool reads 'pages', but what else would be counted as a page read?

On the flip side, 'innodb_pages_written' and 'innodb_buffer_pool_pages_flushed' seem consistent.  
Anyone have any clues?

I haven't gotten any responses to my question from Friday, so I figured I'd post a more direct question:

The two variables 'innodb_pages_read' and 'innodb_buffer_pool_reads' are different.  'Innodb_pages_read' seems consistently higher than the buffer_pool_reads.  Certainly the buffer pool reads 'pages', but what else would be counted as a page read?

On the flip side, 'innodb_pages_written' and 'innodb_buffer_pool_pages_flushed' seem consistent.  
Anyone have any clues?