I've been highly gratified to see the response to this Open Source CEO Series. I've been impressed by the sincerity and wisdom most of the answers have revealed. Running an open source company at the beginning of the commercial wave is challenging.

Nowhere is this more true than with John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. I've known John for several years now, and can still remember first meeting him at an SDForum event (back in 2004, as I've described before). John, Clint, and Jacob approached me after I spoke on an open source panel and told me about their idea for an open source CRM company. I thought they were fools, because clearly open source wouldn't work in the application space.

Four years later, it's clear that I, not they, deserve the "fool" title.

In this eleventh …

MySQL AB today concluded its "Twelve Days of Scale-Out" educational initiative by presenting a case study on mixi.jp, the third most-popular Web site in Japan.

Each day from June 11-22, the MySQL Web site has been highlighting how many of the world's fastest-growing companies are using the MySQL database to cost-effectively scale-out their successful online businesses.

This is really too easy.  Finding stupid and idiotic things about Vista is really just too easy.  This installment is not about any type of GUI but rather with the lack of secure inter-machine remoting capability.

Here at MySQL we have several Windows virtual machines setup to perform builds and tests of both our server code and our connectors.  Our builds are automated to be sure but our build engineers still need to "shell" into a remote box to perform some functions.  As any reasonable group would, we use ssh authentication for both our Linux and Windows boxes.  The problem, of course, is that no edition of Windows has shipped with a secure shell server or client.  Our build team is left with only a few alternatives and they have chosen to install cygwin on the Windows boxes.  Considering that cygwin has only recently become stable on 64 bit systems, this was shaky at best.

Now I realize that …

There has been a lot of fuss kicked up lately over the definition of open source (kicked off by Michael Tiemann), and the OSI's role in defining that term. Word on the street is that CentricCRM will be launching a significant piece of code (Team Elements) under Larry Rosen's Open Software License early next week. This is fantastic news for CentricCRM, as well as for open source (OSI-approved open source).

Why for open source? Because Team Elements is cool and very useful technology. It's a 100% open source, Java-based "Enterprise 2.0" product. It ties together discussions, wikis, blogs, RSS, issue tracking and trouble-ticketing, project management, document management, and federated search into a single, unified …

You can find the material following these links:

• The slides for Part 1 in PDF format.
• The slides for Part 2 in PDF format.
• The slides for Part 3 in PDF format.
• Webex and Slides for Part 4 - MySQL Cluster
• Webex and Slides for Part 5 - Performance and Benchmarking
• Webex and Slides for …

Q from Efrat: Is there a flag I can use to tell the replication server to ignore duplicate entries? Currently it stops replicating each time it get duplicate entry
You can configure replication in order to ignore errors (all or some specific errors, such as a duplicate). In any case, the reason is that when you have a duplicate, this means there is some conflict, and the slave doesn't know which is right. There is coming conflict detection and resolution in some future version.

Q from Efrat: From where can I download a free trial version of MySql Enterprise server?
You can ontact mysql sales for a 30-day mysql enterprise trial, which includes MySQL Network Monitoring and Advisory Service

Q from Danilo: What is index merge?
It's when the optimizer merges several rows using one same index. See section 7.2.6 in the MySQL 5.0 …

Just came across a new exploit related to PHP code within GIF images. Thanks Sox

At the end of next month (July 2007), this blog (and actually the entire site) will go offline.

About eight months ago, I announced that I discontinued my work related to patent policy, but that I would keep this blog online for some more time as an archive of former postings. In the meantime, I became involved with football policy and confirmed that fact in this blog. Other than that, I have not made any new postings.

I am glad to see that there was still a significant number of downloads of my electronic book as well as visits to this blog. However, if a blog ceases to deliver news, it becomes somewhat pointless after a while, and that’s why this site will be taken off the net within a little more than month. There will be no further announcements: at some point around the end of July (or maybe in early August), the site will simply be inaccessible.

There is no particular reason for this decision. The date is related …

While MySQL already provides some functionality to store and operate on geospatial data, the functionality leaves quite a lot to be desired and is far from providing full OpenGIS compatibility. Most notably is that all functions that query spatial data only operate on MBRs (minimum bounding rectangles), to simplify the operations.

Thanks to my colleague Alexey "Holyfoot" Botchkov from Izhevsk, Russia, some of the spatial relation functions like INTERSECTS and WITHIN now work in the way they are described by OpenGIS and not by using MBR's as it used to be. He has been working on improving the GIS functionality as a side project and the work has now reached a level at which he is ready to give it some public …

These days, we seem to be getting a lot of inquiries from new or would-be DRBD adopters, especially MySQL and PostgreSQL DBAs wanting to add high availability to their master database servers. And these, unsurprisingly, turn out to be two of their most popular questions:

How will using DRBD affect my write performance?

… and …

What are DRBD’s most important tunables with regard to write performance?

Let’s take a look at both of these issues. Ready? Let’s go.

Basically, there’s usually one important potential bottleneck in any DRBD “Protocol C” (synchronous replication) setup, and it’s not the network connection. With ubiquitous Gigabit Ethernet links available to be dedicated for DRBD replication, network latency and throughput become negligable variables. The …