Last year (almost to the day), I wrote a post that detailed how JBoss went from $0 to a $350 million acquisition by Red Hat and scored a range of paying customers along the way. The research for that post was actually done in preparation for an OSCON presentation I was to deliver, which is the same impetus for this post.

One year later, my analysis of JBoss has proved to be remarkably accurate (at least for Alfresco). However, I was a little off on my timing (see the slide at right), and I didn't give enough credit to the power of open source to drive sales.

One year later, I'd add the following observations to my original analysis:

• …

IBM pledges patents for software interoperability. Digium acquires Sokol & Associates. OpenLogic releases open source software discovery tool to the public. (and more)

IBM Pledges Free Access to Patents Involved in Implementing 150+ Software Standards, IBM (Press Release)

Digium Acquires Key Asterisk Open Source Partner Sokol & Associates, Digium (Press Release)

OpenLogic Announces General Availability of Free Open Source Software Discovery Tool, OpenLogic (Press Release)

Emulex Virtual HBA Technology Accepted into Open Source Linux Kernel, Emulex (Press Release) …

Damien Seguy had an interesting observation on my use of self joins for generating rolling sums.

A sysadmin friend of mine was describing some DBA work he was doing, and wrote this:

I’m not much of a DBA, really - if it can’t be done through phpMyAdmin I’m not likely to be doing it.

This is in stark contrast to so many so-called DBAs who say “I’m a DBA….If it can’t be done through phpMyAdmin it must be Senior DBA work.”

I’ve used phpMyAdmin for MySQL administration, and there’s just something so nice about working on commandline.

Lately, I have had opportunity to evaluate a very large Ruby installation that also was growing very quickly. A lot of the work performed on site has been specific to the site, but other observations are true for the platform no matter what is being done on it. This article is about Ruby On Rails and its interaction with MySQL in general.

Continue reading "Rubyisms"

Matt Asay recently interviewed Eero Teerikorpi, CEO of Continuent in his Open Source CEO series and despite of the great interview, I wanted to take it a step further and asked Eero elaborate on some issues. In one way this is also a continuation of my Open Source Business Meme from some weeks ago.

Some key advice Eero pointed out in the article was the importance of partners and channels:

‘’Another surprise is partner networking, or actually the lack of it. Maybe this is result of open source companies’ natural tendency to focus on services and, for the most part, on a direct sales model. Open source companies have created tight-knit partner communities, which are excellent vehicles …

Taking the cue from Jay Pipes, as so many other bloggers have done, I present the five things I would most like to see in a future release of MySQL. 1. Metrics, Metrics, Metrics! The more the better. I want to be able to debug issues on the database, but MySQL lacks good metrics on [...]

I’m real excited about our upcoming seminars for Oracle DBAs who want to learn MySQL. Having used Oracle myself for many years, I know full well there are lots of cases where Oracle and MySQL are a great combination to have in a side-by-side manner. There are things you can do with Oracle that you can’t do with MySQL and (believe it or not…) there are things you can do with MySQL that you can’t do with Oracle. Plus we have lots of folks who offload Oracle application data to MySQL data marts/warehouses or other systems. This being the case, it’s not surprising that even the IOUG (International Oracle Users Group) admit that now 1/3 of Oracle shops use MySQL.

The upcoming seminars, scheduled for New York (August 14th) and San Francisco (August 16th) don’t contain fluffy presenations, but instead focus on the hard-core tech details DBAs love. Oracle DBAs will leave these seminars armed with the information they need to smartly …

One of the major contributing factors to the success of MySQL is the ease and simplicity of its replication. Read-slaves for scaleout and backup-slaves for noninterrupting backups are the norm in any MySQL installation I have seen in the last two years.

So how does replication work? And how shall it be expanded in the future?

What is available?

The binlog written by MySQL currently logs all statements changing the tablespace. It is a serialization of all tablespace changes. The binlog position, expressed as (binlog name, offset), is a database global timestamp - a timestamp expressed in seconds.fraction does not work for any precision at all, because on a multi-core machine multiple things can happen concurrently.

If you want to make a consistent full backup of the database, the database must not change during the backup. That is, it must be possible to associate one and exactly …

OpenMoko releases open source phone. Turbolinux works with Microsoft on Open XML. Alfresco releases updated Community Edition. (and more)

Openmoko goes live, Openmoko (Press Release)

Major Linux Distributor Joins Open Source Open XML-ODF Translator Project, Turbolinux / Microsoft (Press Release)

Alfresco Innovates with New Community Edition, Delivers First-Ever Open Source Mashable Enterprise Content Services, Alfresco Software (Press Release)

New Python-based database communication tool represents first open source …