We next go "In the Trenches" with Kevin Henrikson of Zimbra. Zimbra wasn't the first to build a slick email system with a strong AJAX feel, but it has clearly taken the lead among its peers. The backbone of that position is its engineering team, with Kevin at the heart of the organization.

As it turns out, regardless of all the "sex appeal" that Zimbra has in the market (and it has plenty), Kevin's comments reveal that it's community feedback that makes the company tick. Community feedback and an active engineering team that solicits and acts on that feedback, often in real-time. This is the heart of a successful open source business, and Kevin shows us how it's done.

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Kevin Henrikson, director of Engineering, Zimbra. I currently manage our client engineering team which develops the Zimbra Advanced Client (AJAX based) and Standard Client (JSP/HTML based), the latter …

It has become obvious that there are just too many people to meet up with, and too many locations to travel to, with so little time to do them all. So setting up temporary office, seems to make the most sense! Those that have emailed me, have also received the following in their email.

Where?
Lobby Lounge Restaurant/Cafe
Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel
392, Havelock Rd
Singapore

When?
Thursday, July 5 2.30pm - 6pm
Friday, July 6 8am - 11am

What to do if I’m not there?
Just drop me an SMS or a quick call to +6-012-204-3201.

This is in addition to the meetup we’re having. Depending on how my meetings on Friday go, there might be yet another afternoon session available.

Technorati Tags: …

MySQL Toolkit distribution 620 updates documentation and test suites, includes some major bug fixes and functionality changes, and adds one new tool to the toolkit. This article is mostly a changelog, with some added notes. Many of the tools have matured and I just needed to make the documentation top-notch, but there’s still a lot to be done on the crucial checksumming and syncing tools. Time is in short supply for me right now, though.

I stumbled across this article in the International Herald Tribune today and was shocked by how off such an otherwise reputable publication could be. The general tone of the article was that open source is struggling to grow. I'm not sure how 100 percent year-over-year growth for the prominent commercial open-source start-ups connotes "struggling," but....

On one hand, open-source developers are continuing to struggle to find ways to make money from open-source software, most of which is given away.

But the only way to do so is to work closely with their biggest rivals--proprietary software makers like International Business Machines, Microsoft, SAP, Cisco and Oracle--which also have an interest in limiting erosion to their own sales.

Since when? We have a host of open-source companies jockeying to be first out the …

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them --George Bernard Shaw

In the ideal world the operational source would provide a mechanism for identifying changes made to the data since the last extract, also known as change data capture (CDC). The source may contain update date, database online log scrubbing mechanism, or audit logs, etc. for the purpose. In the real life, many sources will dump the complete data into a file and the responsibility for identifying the changes to the data will fall on the data warehouse processes. Or even if one of the CDC mechanisms is provided by the source it may not be reliable enough.

The CDC process is straightforward for transactional data, for example: sales transactions. Since the transactions always come with effective dates, the new transactions are …

As mentioned before, since FooCamp I've been having ideas around
queue services:

http://krow.livejournal.com/531369.html
http://krow.livejournal.com/530752.html

I've been thinking about this a bit more, and instead of working on
the concept of a straight queue mechanism (like what Oracle has),
I've been thinking more about how web services handle this, in
particular services like Amazon's.

Instead of a flat queue structure, shoot for a temporal queue.

A range select should force rows to go away for a set period of time,
until the timer run's out. This gives the processing application time
to deal with the row, and if it doesn't make it back in time, the row
should reappear to go back in the …

I’ve read through Top 5 (or more) wishes posted by number of MySQL employees as well as by a lot of community members.
It was great to see so wide coverage as people with different backgrounds wish different things - Developers have some wishes to ease development process, MySQL DBAs would like stuff related to operations like Hot Backup. People actively working with Performance problems like Kevin,Jeremy or me have bunch of performance and scaling related wishes.

There is also a good overlap among people wishes which shows there are some things which are really needed badly.

The great question now is what will happen next ? Will there be any action taken to target wishes which make the most sense ? I heard Jay is collecting and summarizing these wishes so they would not be just lost but will there any true action taking ?

What I would like to see is MySQL taking a time to discuss and prioritize these internally and …

In my last post I’ve asked for any help on my project. So, tanks to Jay Pipes for his tip.
One of most developer problems is documentation. And a good solution was initially appeared in Java with javadoc. At now many languages have special javadoc-like tools. I’ve made a little research, and decided to use jsdoc and phpdoc in my project. I am still open for any suggestions

Today, I again spent about an hour to revert changes made by spambots on various MySQL Forge Wiki pages. As I was really sick of this, I now installed a new plugin: reCAPTCHA - this will hopefully raise the bar for spambots to create new user accounts automatically for spamming the Wiki. If you are a registered user already, you will probably not notice the change - by default, CAPTCHAs are only displayed on the following events:

• New user registration
• Anonymous edits that contain new external links
• Brute-force password cracking

Let's hope it helps! Please let me know if you still experience spam problems on the Wiki.

Ever wondered what happens after you submit a bug report to MySQL?
Puzzled at the cryptic messages that tell you about your report going from verified to in process?
Who on earth are those Valeriy, Sinisa, Victoria, Miguel, Sveta, Tonci who comment on your report?
Wonder no more.

MySQL bug processing explained disclose in tiny detail who are the busy bees in MySQL hive and how do they get from the pollen of your bug report to the honey of a bug fix.