While catching up on some interesting chat on IRC today, I decided to watch the Alan Cox video series that Red Hat Magazine recently placed online.

In Alan Cox and the state of free software:

• Alan speaks about software patents, as a problem for free software. Lots are starting to understand that they don’t work and they violate international treaties.
• Alan talks about political systems - so you can’t get free software into government or schools, because of certain vendors that they choose. Approved suppliers cause grief, when they only supply proprietary software.
• Alan talks about the OpenDocument Format and OOXML mess, and it confuses people, who want standards (FUD).
• A challenge now, seems to be that there are a large number of free software users now, who are not …

I recently reread the book called ?Execution ? The Art of Getting Things Done? and although its somewhat old, it has surprisingly good and practical advise about putting your focus more on getting things done and less on thinking about strategies.

Or where I read from somewhere recently ?The goal is to work, not think about working? which was in reference to keeping a planning meeting fixed to a certain number of hours.

Of course, you do need strategy, but if you don?t actually make sure that what you planned get done, or alternately, notice that your strategy may not be working then it just won?t work.

Hey! Wait a minute! Don?t you do Theory all the Time

Yes, I am very guilty of it myself about just thinking of things and not doing them. I even wrote about it at the top of one of …

I was finishing up a business trip in Madrid yesterday and heading back to the airport while making sporadic calls into our conference calls that were going on. The Sun acquisition is now closed and we are part of the worlds biggest Open Source company. Mårten Mickos is heading the Sun Database Technology Group the Sun Database Group, which in addition to MySQL includes some happy Norwegians (they are always happy) of the Sun owned Clustra Systems, known as the Database Technology Group, who also sing drinking songs in their own language :-) They also work on the Apache Derby project. However, there was no mention of any Postgres developers falling under Mårten (caveat: I wasn't able to hear everything). I think it might be best so :-)

Here is the funny video of today, it is a documentary of the evolution of the species known as Sun Sales Engineers (I'm a Sales Engineer):

…

This was the idea.

With consistent hashing we have data spread out over servers. A loss of a single server removed 1/N of the available cache.

Not bad, but it is also not perfect for everyone. Some users would rather use more hardware and take an approach of fewer losses.

What needed to be done was to replicate the data to multiple node, and handle node failure. This has been on the list for a while :)

Did I get to it? Nope.

Did someone else? Yep.

I got a patch for this a few days ago from a user using memcached that needed it.

So now:

memcached_return enable_replication(memcached_st *memc)
{
uint64_t value;
value= 2;

memcached_behavior_set(memc, MEMCACHED_BEHAVIOR_REPLICAS, &value);
}


All you now need to do is set the number of servers you want to …

UPDATED - As you can see from the comments on this, the change is not Sun limiting Enterprise Unlimited, but being being more open about the limits. Kudos to Sun for doing so - UPDATED.

Sun Microsystems has announced the completion of its acquisition of MySQL - “the most important acquisition in the modern software industry” according to Jonathan Schwartz - and that MySQL’s open souirce database is now backed by Sun’s “17,000-strong global sales and services organization and its extensive international network of authorized distribution channels”.

The company has also confirmed that MySQL Enterprise Unlimited, the site-wide agreement …

Many CMDBA (Certified MySQL Database Administrator) candidates give away points on their exams that could be remedied with a half hour of exploration. This is not an easy set of exams but there is something you can do to add points to your score. The way to do this is to install MySQL on a Windows system.

Many in the FOSS world may never actually touch a Windows system. But if you look around, you may be able to find an older, unused system sitting around for this exercise. Many folks have older windows systems gathering dust that you can borrow.

Once you have the Windows box, here is a three part exercise to help boost your exam scores.

One: Download and install the Windows binaries. The install features a wizard to guide you through installation. You will now have an instance of MySQL on your system.

Two: Track down the configuration files and add a second instance.

Three: …

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Sun completes acquisition of MySQL. Adobe launches open source site, new version of Flex. Bluenog obtains $4m in new funding. (and more)

Sun Microsystems Announces Completion of MySQL Acquisition; Paves Way for Secure, Open Source Platform to Power the Network Economy, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Adobe Technology Platform for RIAs Propels Innovation on the Web, Adobe Systems (Press Release)

NewSpring Capital Leads $4mm Investment in Bluenog, Bluenog (Press Release)

Novell …

For the MySQL users who are still unfamiliar with the new features of MySQL Enterprise (2007 Fall Edition), I will present a webinar on this topic on Monday 3rd of March @ 3pm CET. The webinar will be in Italian, but the slides are rigourously in English, so if you are interested, just wait approx one week and you will be able to download slides and recording of this event.

The latest version of MySQL Enterprise is powered with an improved version of the Enterprise Monitor, which has a new set of Replication advisors and new set of cool graphs, to instantly control your servers. There is also a big improvement in the overall scalability of the Enterprise Monitor.

During the presentation we will discuss these new features and we will see the latest improvements in the Enterprise binaries.

If you are interested in any specific detail associated to this topic, feel free to comment on this blog or to drop me …

chyrp is a nice looking piece of blog software. individual posts can have different styles, something it borrowed from the hosted tumblr service. i was interested to read about “the sql query massacre of january 19th, 2008” but the numbers gave me pause — 21 queries to generate the index page? that is down from an astounding 116, but that still seems ridiculous to me.

the number of queries to generate the index of this site? two. one of them is SET NAMES utf8. i could see boosting that to three or four if i moved some things like the list of links in the sidebar into the database, or added archive links. call it five if i had user accounts.

but right now, the number of queries used to load the index page …