Matthew Aslett is highlighting four open source startups to watch: Aptar, GravityZoo, Loopfuse, and Untangle. I've talked about Loopfuse and Untangle before, but Aptar and GravityZoo are news to me.

That's one of the great things about the commercial open source ecosystem right now. People can complain that there aren't enough (public) examples of success yet, but one of the great examples of general commercial open source success is that there are so many new companies getting funded and/or getting traction. This is a vibrant, growing ecosystem.

Growing in breadth, but also growing in depth. My employer, Alfresco, reported strong momentum in our last quarter (we basically double every …

My blog is blocked to those who have a livejournal account. I set it
up this way years ago because I hate dealing with comment bots that
generate SPAM. This means I get a lot of back channel comments on my
posts (aka email, IM, IRC) that you never actually see on the
site... I don't normally post them but this one from email was pretty
interesting:


The challenging design issues about queuing are about locking and
indexing, not about the API. The API to look at queues and message
should be SQL (so you can use SQL to access the message properties,
the message history, and the payload or do auditing and tracking),
but the API to modify the queue must be something else to preserve
the integrity of the queue.

Oracle Streams AQ does not support data manipulation language (DML)
operations on a queue table or an associated …

With all the discussion going on about MySQL Proxy, we may forget that there are alternatives.
Today in the MySQL Dev Zone there is an article about a different proxy. It's more than that, actually. It is a Perl Module implementing the MySQL client/server protocol.
With this tool, you can emulate some of MySQL Proxy features, and you can do something more. For example, you can use Federated tables with non-MySQL database servers. The article features an example where a table from SQLite and a table from PostgreSQL are queried as if they were normal MySQL tables.

The Chinese Academy of Electronics and Information Technology (CAEIT), one of the largest national institutes in China, has selected MySQL Cluster as its database platform for data gathering and analysis.

I was playing with the 5 sample tutorial Lua scripts available here with the MySQL Proxy, but I was doing something a little inefficiently.

I started mysqld, then I started the MySQL Proxy with the lua script, then connected to MySQL via the proxy. To test a different script I was actually killing the MySQL Proxy and restarting with appropriate script, but this is unnecessary. MySQL Proxy will re-read the lua script, as specified with –proxy-lua-script on new connection. All I need to do is copy in the file in question and get a new mysql client connection.

The tech version of the right way:

$ cp tutorial-basic.lua running.lua
$ ./mysql-proxy --proxy-lua-script=running.lua &
$ mysql -uusr -p -P4040 -h127.0.0.1
mysql> # do my stuff
mysql> exit;
$ cp …

A week or so ago I mentioned that I'd be running an "Open Source @" series of posts, and try to capture the work that various large enterprises are doing with open source. Being large enterprises, it has taken a bit longer to collect these than I would have liked, but we now have a critical mass and can move forward.

Today we're profiling Oracle. I have been harshly critical of Oracle in the past, and yet I continue to hold the company in high esteem. Oracle is one of the few winners in the proprietary "battle of the ecosystems." I do business with a wide range of Global 2000 businesses, and I see Oracle all over. I can't say the same of several of Oracle's competitors.

I asked Mike …

Brian postulates the idea of a "Queue" engine and why it is impractical. I agree that a queue storage engine doesn't really work too well. What would work better would be either a special 'queue' object type which may use any user accessible storage engine or perhaps a non-standard extension to the SQL syntax:

DEQUEUE message FROM queue_table LIMIT 1;

This can be done in (perhaps) the MySQL Proxy, where it is translated into a SELECT/DELETE combination or it can be added to the server, and should not cause much parser complications.


Then any storage engine may be used for a queue, purely dependent upon the user's requirements as some people will be satisfied with a non-persistent MEMORY based queue, MYISAM queues will be adequate for many and for a few who need …

A few months ago, I had a meeting with a small local startup. Their tech and their pitch is pretty neat. They had an angel kick them a megabuck of seed to get started. It's the classic geek startup: two main guys, one wearing the CEO/sales/biz/money hat, and the other wearing the CTO/it/tech/arch/geek hat. And they've hired a couple of coders.

But they've also rented some office space: two cubes, a meeting room, a front desk, and a lockable office for the locking file cabinet. Now, it was cheap office space, but still, why?

It's a waste of the angel's money, is increasing their burn. For what it's costing them, they could hire another coder. Dev speed is their current bottleneck, and going from 2 to 3 causes only minimal invocation of Brook's Law, especially if it's early. If they start to grow, they'll have to hire #3 and #4 soon enough anyway, at which point they've outgrown their space, and now also have the cost, …

krow just posted about the the difficulties of implementing a Queue Engine for MySQL.

I don't think it's really that impossible. Yes, there are some kind of SELECTs that either don't make sense, or are almost certainly not what the user wants, or are impossible to do.

But trying to use a very specialized engine for general purpose queries is not really something to worry about.

I would take the same approach that I do with my S3 storage engine, e.g., implement whatever makes sense, and then for the cases were it doesn't make sense, tell the user "So, don't do that, then!".

For a queue engine, I would separate the …

After mentioning Blaine Cook's use of MySQL as a queue engine for Twitter I've been pinged about why couldn't one be written for MySQL.

Useful? Hell yes.

Possible? Not Really.

Lets look at the simple case.

CREATE TABLE queue (id serial, message text);

INSERT INTO queue VALUES (message) "This is the first message";
INSERT INTO queue VALUES (message) "This is the second message";
INSERT INTO queue VALUES (message) "This is the third message";

In an application that would use this, the sort of query you would see would be:

SELECT message FROM queue LIMIT 1;

For a queue engine to work, it would always need to respond with the first record in, being the first record out. So you would get:

"This is the …