I'd like to bring two announcements to your attention, that I posted to our internals Mailing list a few days ago - both refer to ongoing activities at MySQL AB to further open up our development processes and to establish an Architecture of Participation around the MySQL Server and related applications.

I am excited to be able to talk about this topic at the upcoming FrOSCon, which will take place on August, 25th-26th in Sankt Augustin, Germany. The title of my presentation will be "Opening the doors of the Cathedral - Enabling an architecture of participation around the MySQL Server". Here's the abstract:

Even though the MySQL Server is released and distributed as Open Source Software (OSS) under the GPL, the development itself so far has mostly …

During our last major survey, we had a number of you indicate that you’re running MySQL databases in the 500GB to multi-TB range. We’re now mapping out the plans for upcoming server releases, and we’re especially interested in adding enhancements for very large MySQL DB’s. If you own one of these beasts, please contact me at rschumacher@mysql.com, let me know how big your database(s) are, and what features we should add to make your life easier.

Sun open sources clustering code. Eclipse ships largest release to-date. GPLv3 to be released on Friday. (and more)

Sun Donates High Availability Cluster Code to the Open Source Community, Enables Accelerated Innovation In Scale Out Architectures, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Eclipse Ships Largest-Ever Release of Leading Open Source Software Development Platform, Eclipse Foundation (Press Release)

GPLv3 upgrade set for Friday, InfoWorld, Paul Krill (Article)

Enterprise Linux 5 May Lift Red Hat Q1 Earnings, LinuxInsider (Article)

…

Computerworld has Marten Mickos on the hot seat about the growth of MySQL and what happens next. As always, Marten is insightful and rational. I am jealous that I am not as clear-headed. I am very passionate about open source. And I do believe that it is a superior method. But at the same time, I must be pragmatic. So when they say being dogmatic is very important for the Free Software Foundation ? well, they should be. That?s what we respect them for. But running a business is not about dogma. We are not judgmental about our customers or... READ MORE

Today was the day to cancel Clearwire. In short, it has never worked. I moved
it around my house, played with getting the direction right... it
just never worked. When it did work I would get bandwidth for all of
five or so minutes before the speed dropped to something I had not
seen since using dialup.

I've been really not looking forward to canceling the service. I
expected a major run around and to hear someone tell me that they
wanted to send out a representative before I would be allowed to leave.

By the end of the call, which took only 10 minutes, they agreed to
send me the mailing slip to return the modem. They won't end the
service until they get the modem, so I will be sending it off today
via UPS as soon as the email with the slip arrives.

The cancellation fee is $180, which is steep for a service that never …

From the Freakonomics blog "The
Benefits of a Bubble, Event When Burst", I was thinking a bit
about the last bubble and what we gained from it.

Cheap Hardware. For quite a while after the bubble burst Ebay
was the place to buy hardware. Need a high end router, or an
expensive load balancer? You could get all of it from Ebay. There are
a number of startups that I work with that all got their start during
that period. Only in the last few years have they been replacing all
of the hardware they picked up from the last bubble.

Data Centers. There was a build out of data centers which
completely collapsed. Companies swooped in and bought these up. The
number of cheap data centers that are up for grabs is long gone. I
expect …

I guess there's life in them old proprietary software bones yet. At least, there is for Oracle. As "cave men" go, Oracle is evolving very quickly, as Jason Maynard (Credit Suisse) notes:

Some of the key highlights from the call were 21% y/y cash flow growth, a re-acceleration of the technology business to 15% growth, and 46% operating margins in Q4. We think the vertical applications acquisition strategy is proving to be an effective tool to win both new accounts and pull through additional middleware and database products. Oracle appears to be gaining share in the application server market and continues to separate from its database competitors like IBM. Oracle?s Q1 guidance was also better than expected as the company expects new software license revenue to grow 20%-30% significantly ahead of our expectation of 10%+....

The strength in the quarter …

When something is slow, why do we always point to the database? A computer system is so much more than "the application" and "the database". It's networks, routers, disks, memory, array controllers, middle-tiers, JDBC Drivers, Operating Systems, and client versions (which, usually comes round to "It's Oracle/MySQL, fix it"). Come to think of it, it's pretty amazing that we get decent performance at all.

Everybody is guilty of it from the novice to the experience person who knows better. Heck, I am sometimes guilty of it myself.

I'll get a call, "Application XYZ is slow, is the database OK?"

"Let me check."

A couple minutes later I indicate everything is fine on my end. I hear three days later that "XYZ was slow because of the database". Argh. Next time that person needs help tuning a query he'll get pointed to the documentation for EXPLAIN PLAN.

Why do we always point to …

[Update 2007/08/17: I just found out, that this entry got overwritten by another one. A corrupted MySQL key file might have caused this.]

As a developer, reading things on the web, you come by Joel Spolsky pretty quickly. Joel is a top-notch essayist with many a story to share from his days on the Microsoft Excel Team and his current company Fog Creek. Now, Joel cares for a good read. Being sick of bad writing he tried to make an example of good software writing. He compiled a list of essays from The Net he deemed worth publishing in a book. Joel introduces each essay with a few comments. The preface to the piece by Michael “Rands” Lopp says, in my words, when you're done with this, you'll be going …

The latest download binaries for SolidDB 5.0.41 version is now available. There were no major issues in the compilation, but I had to explicitly remove some of the GIS code due to errors. Note that this compilation is mainly for testing the Solid engine so I have simplified the option to exclude innodb (and most engines) and geometry capabilities, otherwise it is pretty much all there .

A precompiled binary is available for SolidMySQL 5.0.41-0073 for Mac OS X (PPC)

Please email me at info@cybersite.com.au if you have any problems with the binaries running. If you have issues with the storage engine itself, please read the documentation and forums at the SolidDB website.