As open source and open source business is rapidly becoming mainstream as witnessed e.g. by the latest estimates from IDC , I felt it was an appropriate time to try to get some feedback from entrepreneurs and experts in this space about some of the do’s and don’ts they have learned over the years building open source businesses.

But first my own observations:

3 Success factors / best practices:

1) Solid value proposition

Pretty obvious, but it is surprising how difficult at it is to explain your product or service offering concisely and compellingly.

2) Business model that supports healthy margins

There are challenges in the open source business where you are competing against incumbents with an offering that typically seems to be priced lower, or at least in my experience I …

RAID is dying. Shocked? The prediction might be a bit early for some folks. It’s still somewhat conventional for some people to think that RAID is a conservative way to scale your IO.

I’d like to assert that in 3-5 years RAID will be a thing of the past.

Want some evidence? Google doesn’t use RAID. They’ve build a database infrastructure which avoids expensive and proprietary hardware controllers.

You could call it a redundant array of inexpensive servers.

Other scale out shops which don’t have access to such toys have built out sharded MySQL installations. LiveJournal, Flickr, Facebook. These shops are using RAID in some situations but they …

MySQL Archiver is the implementation of the efficient forward-only archiving and purging strategies I wrote about more than a year ago. It nibbles rows from a table, then inserts them into another table and/or writes them to a file. The object is to do this without interfering with critical online transaction-processing (OLTP) queries.

So, the open source community/mentality/legacy/mindset tends to be attached to the idea:

“Free as in beer” — for comparison’s sake, another meaning could be, “free as in speech”.

Wikipedia has a good explanation of this, making “free as in beer” equivalent to “gratis,” meaning “free of cost.” Whereas “free as in speech” is equivalent to “libre,” free of restrictons.

Now, I understand why some things cost no money but are restricted. I also understand why some things cost no money and are not restricted. I do not have a particular religion either way, I think each product’s business model can be different.

So I’ll present a third concept: “Free as in water.”

Water is a privilege. In many places, …

I’ve just submitted “Leverage LSI to Open Source MegaCli” to the Dell IdeaStorm website:

Dell makes some awesome and affordable hardware. Many new Dell machines have the PERC 5/i SAS RAID controller, which is a rebranded LSI MegaRAID SAS.

LSI makes some nice RAID cards. Dell likes LSI. Dell made a deal with LSI to provide the chips for their fancy new PERC 5/i cards.

We buy machines with these cards in them. We need to monitor our RAIDs, rebuild them, and do all manner of other maintenance tasks. We do not expect LSI to provide perfect tools. LSI is a hardware vendor, and it’s understandable that they provide terrible *software*. What is NOT understandable, though, is why LSI’s terrible tools are closed source.

What is further incomprehensible is why Dell is willing to accept this situation on …

This is perhaps the first I've ever heard someone credibly say that Microsoft must now live by open source's rules, or suffer. As Marten Mickos (CEO, MySQL) told The Register, If you won't work with MySQL, PHP and Ruby then you are lost.Wow. Say those same words (and maybe add in "Linux," "Apache," and others) five years ago and Microsoft could have legitimately laughed. But no more. Microsoft must partner with open source companies and communities, or it's business will tank. Not immediately, of course, but imagine a world where Microsoft is an island of proprietary software, surrounded by the... READ MORE

Again, this post is slightly off topic since I'm on vacation, but I wanted to point out a source for good freeware utilities for Windows.  I was looking for a good Windows outliner program and not having much luck and my Java Flex guru buddy Bruce Eckel pointed this site out to me.  If you're looking for a bit torrent client, a photo organizer, HTML editor, registry editor or any of a few dozen other items, this site will spare you the tedious research. The recommended outliner, Keynote, is available under an open source license, but it's no longer in active development.

• Tech Support Alert: …

This week I already had two serious performance regression cases when upgrading from MySQL 4.0 and 4.1 to MySQL 5.0. By serious I mean several times performance difference not just 5-10% you often see for simple queries due to generally fatter code.

The problem in both cases was MySQL 5.0 broken group commit bug.

First I should note I am extremely unhappy how MySQL handled this problem. While working for MySQL we spotted this problem early in MySQL 5.0 release cycle as it was introduced and reported it to everyone we could inside the company - this was over 2 years ago. Few months later I created a bug for this issue to get more public attention to the problem and giving extra motivation to MySQL to fix it. Few months later I blogged about this problem with more …

Just short message that patch enables microsecond resolution in slow-log (see more http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/09/06/slow-query-log-analyzes-tools/) for 5.0.37 is available here:
www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/files/patches/patch.slow-micro.5.0.37.diff

The patch for 5.0.41 :
www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/files/patches/patch.slow-micro.5.0.41.diff

There is a popular myth about the SQL GROUP BY clause. The myth holds that 'standard SQL' requires columns referenced in the SELECT list of a query to also appear in the GROUP BY clause, unless these columns appear exclusively in an aggregated expression. MySQL is often accused of violating this standard.

In this article I will attempt to debunk this myth, and to provide a more balanced view regarding MySQL's treatment of GROUP BY at the same time.