Marten Mickos has summarized his rules for how to disrupt an industry. This is advice worth heeding, especially when you consider that many of the companies recently acquired (or invested in) at outsized valuations (Zimbra, Blue Lithium, SurfControl, Hyperion, TellMe, Fotolog, YouTube, Facebook, etc.) have one core thing in common:

MySQL.

Marten's first rule for disruptors is also perhaps the most important: Follow no model.

There used to be a well-worn path to software success: build a proprietary product, sell a perpetual license, make service contracts imperative, and release a new version every few years in what amounted to a "mandatory" upgrade. This model worked for more than two decades.

What changed? ...

I submitted proposals for the MySQL Conference & Expo.SQL AntiPatterns III thought it would be a no-brainer to do a sequel of my 2007 talk, "SQL AntiPatterns". That talk was very well attended, thanks to Jay Pipes' endorsement in his guide to the conference. It's not hard to come up with all-new content for a sequel!Topics in this presentation:* Corrupt your data by storing images in files

It's by no means the most interesting thing that I write about, but Microsoft tops the list of topics read by Open Road readers. In fact, it accounts for four of the top 10 posts on this blog since its inception in July.

The only open-source vendors to crack the top 10 are OpenAds and MySQL. For an open-source blog, that's a wee bit depressing.

Here they are:

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Well, it seems to be the thing to do to talk about the things you submitted to MySQL Conference.  So, I figured I would share.  I submitted 3 topics.

From one server to a cluster

In the last 10 years, dealnews.com has grown from a single shared hosting account to an entire rack of equipment.  Luckily, we started using PHP and MySQL very early in the company’s history.

From the early days of growing a forum to surviving _Slashdotting_, _Digging_ and even a Yahoo! front page mention, we have had to adapt both our hardware and software many times to keep up with the growth.

I will discuss the traps, bottlenecks, and even some big wins we have encountered along the way using PHP and MySQL.  From the small scale to using replication and even some MySQL Cluster we have done many interesting things to give our readers (and our content team) a good experience when …

And to think I believed Mike Olson and his Sleepycat team had gone to sleep in the bowels of Oracle. Not so, as this press release from Oracle attests: Juniper Networks will be integrating Sleepycat's Berkeley DB into its JUNOS software, the network operating system that powers its routers.

Sounds like a really sweet deal to me. And likely a very big one. But why Berkeley DB?

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A while back I wrote a post expressing a longing for wait-interface tuning like we have for Oracle (and now SQL Server, I hear). Since then I have found out that the MySQL community server (since 5.0.37) has something starting along those lines: the query profiler.

Using the query profiler, you can get at wait times for a particular query, to help you tune it. There is the official documentation, and, even better, an article by Robin Schumacher that explains and gives examples.

From here it would probably be a “simple” matter to start collecting all this data system-wide, into a repository, to gather global information on wait-event times.   In the meantime, this is certainly a step in the right direction.

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GPL lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia dropped. Curl opens RIA offering. Covalent offers support for ActiveMQ. (and more)

BusyBox Developers and Monsoon Multimedia Agree to Dismiss GPL Lawsuit, Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) / Monsoon Multimedia (Press Release)

Curl Announces Open Source Strategy for Enterprise Rich Internet Application Platform, Curl (Press Release)

Covalent Technologies Announces Support for Apache ActiveMQ, Covalent Technologies (Press Release)

GigaSpaces Partners With GridGain Systems to Provide Robust Grid Computing Solution, GigaSpace …

A little while ago I offered to take time off work and improve MySQL Table Sync. I’ve gotten a very positive response to that, with several organizations offering to contribute to the bounty, so I’ll go ahead and commit to doing this. The conditions The bounty is $2500 USD. I’ll work on the following features and improvements. I have the grand plan in my head, so this list just kind of describes the plan; I’ll probably end up improving other things at the same time.

mysqlsla v1.7 is ready because v1.6 (and v1.5) had a bug: numbers greater than 999 were printed wrong; internally, though, they were still used correctly. Therefore: do not use v1.6.

Also, v1.7 has a –milliseconds option to make time values less than 1 second print as millisecond values. This option is necessary for slow logs from servers patched with the slow query log millisecond patch.