For the second installment in the Open Source CEO Series, I caught up with Javier Soltero, CEO and Co-founder of Hyperic. Javier is a highly pragmatic open sourceror, fully buying into the open source ethos but not forgetting that customers buy value, not source code.

Name, position, and company of executive
Javier A. Soltero, CEO and Co-founder, Hyperic

Year company was founded and year you joined it
Hyperic was founded in 2004. Coincidentally, I joined that same year. :-)

Stage of funding and venture firms that have invested
Series B (closed 6/07). Investors: Accel Partners & Benchmark Capital

Background prior to current company
I was Chief Architect at Covalent in charge of developing products to help manage Apache and its related technology stack (Tomcat, etc.). We built the first version of what later …

Way back in February I gave a webinar on using our Visual Studio integration product with MySQL.  At the time, our code did not integrate very well with the TableAdapter wizard.  To be precise, you really couldn't use stored procedures with a table adapter at all.  During the broadcast, someone asked me about using stored procedures and I told him that I would blog about it once I got it working.  Well, here we are.

Actually, we've had it working for a couple of weeks now but I'm just now getting to the blog post.  You know how it is.  There were several problems at play here but the biggest issues were the fact that we needed to provide an enumerator object for columns that would be returned by a stored procedure.  The second issue was needing to use the DbProviderSpecificTypeProperty attribute on our provider specific type property on the parameter class.  Let's look at each one of these in more …

OK. First off. I broke the rules. There are actually seven here.

I figure Marten, Jay and Stewart can’t be wrong.

… so here it goes.

* Smarter InnoDB checkpointing. The fuzzy checkpointing seems less than ideal. I think you could just fill up memory with data pool modifications and then checkpoint every 3-5 minutes or so writing the entire DB out to disk in one head pass. You’d be able to fully saturate the disks in this manner. Granted faster is better but our 100MBps drives only see 15-30MBps in practice.

You’d need copy on write semantics though so if you’re seeing full …

I see that Marc Andreesen has been updating his blog:
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html


Some commenters have proposed that Amazon's EC2 service would be a way to easily scale a Facebook app (or a non-Facebook web app). I think EC2 is a great service and have no desire to say anything negative about it. So I will just say two things: it isn't as easy as that, and EC2 is not free either. Bonus points to commenters who want to go into more detail on these topics than I have here!


Its good to see that he updated his blog, but he missed addressing this quote:


The implication is, in my view, quite clear -- the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the …

DISCLAIMER (and yes, it's a long one):
Over the years, I have come to love MySQL. I have many friends, colleagues and peers that depend on MySQL in one way or the other to make their living. Friends whose lives and passions revolve around MySQL. Friends who want to change the world (with MySQL). Friends who want to take MySQL to the next level.

I am so fascinated about MySQL's business that when I first received a call for comments that MySQL is re-launching MySQL Enterprise by dividing the development tree, I felt very happy. I had been a part of various conversations by then debating whether a company should invest in MySQL Enterprise. My view was: if you're a tad bit serious about your business or product, you need MySQL Enterprise. For businesses of all sort, that's an investment, which actually has the potential of lowering TCO (yes, I believe so). I remember saying that, in many ways, branching off the development tree …

Mandriva has answered the call, and pre-announced this statement on Microsoft's patent game:

As far as patent protection is concerned, we are not great fans of software patents which we consider as counter productive. We also believe what we see, and until we see hard evidence from, say, SCO or Microsoft, that there are pieces of codes in our software that infringe existing patents, we will assume that any other announcement is just FUD. So we don't believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft to do our job.

A clear statement, and one that lays down good guidelines for Microsoft: if you want Mandriva to play, you need to provide a compelling reason to do so. Microsoft has not yet done so. Time to put up or shut up.

I’ve finally gotten around to adding the last little things that I wanted to do to version 2 of Statpack - my python script for aggregating SHOW [GLOBAL] STATUS output.

Now it connects to a running instance, and allows you to gather statistics from there to generate reports.

Here are the options it supports:

[markleith@medusa:~/Development/statpack/statpack-v2] $ ./statpack.py

Error: No arguments supplied
usage: ./statpack.py [list of arguments]

Non-interactive mode (aggregate txt files containing SHOW STATUS snapshots):

-f –files List of statistics files to aggregate (–files=stat1.txt[, stat2.txt..])
Argument must be first within list of arguments, on it’s own

Interactive mode (connect to running MySQL server for SHOW STATUS snapshots):

-h –host Host for MySQL server to connect to in interactive mode
…

Stefano Comino and Fabio Manenti have written a useful paper [PDF] on dual licensing in open source. It's a decent resource for helping developers and vendors figure out why, if, and how to dual license their software. (See here for a useful explanation of what dual licensing means, and Heather Meeker's piece is a must read for anyone interested in the legal ramifications of the practice.)

I found myself agreeing with much of the authors' conclusions, but not necessarily the tone or conclusion, because they seem to see dual licensing as a way to drive sales. Of course, it sometimes undoubtedly is - for some time a large percentage of MySQL's, Sleepycat's, db4o's, etc. sales were motivated by a proprietary …

After writing up my top 5 MySQL Wishes, and noticing Stewart did the same, I encouraged Mårten to offer his own. As is typical for Mårten, he responded very quickly. Of course, with typical Nordic humility, our CEO provided his answers with a disclaimer:

WARNING: I wrote these 5 wishes as a reflection of my thoughts, but I am afraid that they will mostly just demonstrate (as if it were needed) that I was hired to MySQL for entirely other tasks than figuring out what to do with our software. Enjoy it anyhow! 1. Pluggable Optimisers

Wouldn't it be great if just about anybody could write her/his own optimiser and plug it into MySQL?

Then we could have performance competitions where predefined applications on predefined …

Came across ask a SQL guru today. Service is run by the Microsoft DB MVP’s. You call them (via Skype), and they answer your query, via a video cast. Its quite new, hasn’t proven itself (I mean, why not just ask a forum?), and also offers itself as a video podcast. I’m thinking it can be useful for newer folk, especially if you like step-by-step instructions.

Going by how useful the Guru Bar at the MySQL Expo 2007 was, and how easy it is to make screencasts these days, I wonder if this would be something some guilds members would consider in addition to the wonderful podcast by Sheeri?

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