By Tim O'Reilly

This story has been heard before: distribute millions of copies of your open source software for free, then build a business by servicing the customers who're using that software. Red Hat, JBoss, MySQL have all made a great success with this business model.

Why did it take so long for someone to figure out that this could also be a brilliant new take on the online advertising business? Step one: distribute a free, open source ad server; step two: package up the resulting publisher network for advertisers, regardless of which ad network they want to work with; step three: build additional services for those advertisers.

I caught up last week with Scott Switzer, OpenAds co-founder and community activist, to learn a bit more about OpenAds. It took me a few minutes to understand the OpenAds story (and even now, I may have a few details wrong.) As it turns …

From the city centre of Zurich to the major connecting points for travelling (main station, airport, motorways) it takes you an average of 7 minutes to get there. There's no other city in Europe that as fast to get out of. People argue wether this is a good or bad thing.

The Webtuesday people I met here in Zurich were coming from a couple of independent web-development shops and they are working on some of the top 20 Swiss websites. From the feedback, the talk was well received; overall, they found it interesting to learn about a new technology they could actually use. I'll be putting up the slides for the talk soon.

What I found most interesting were the discussions after the talk, when a couple of guys spend some time trying to apply CouchDb to the problems they currently face. The first bit of interest is that …

In May 2005, I wrote a widely-referenced article about how to efficiently archive and/or purge data from online transaction processing (OLTP) database servers. That article focused on how to write efficient archiving SQL. In this article I'll discuss archiving strategy, not tactics. OLTP servers tend to have complex schemas, which makes it important and sometimes difficult to design a good archiving strategy.

Yesterday night, I presented "Scaling InnoDB for Fotolog" at the New York MySQL Meetup. Judging from the number of questions, and how many people stayed after the presentation was over, I can say that it was a success.

I was very excited when I saw Partha Dutta (of Right Media) enter the room. Had really good chat with folks from New York Times.

Later, Kerry Ancheta, Partha, Michelle and I went to Les Halles. I had "cotes d'Agneau grillees au Romarin", which was really yummy.

A big thanks to Marc Simony of Logic Works for inviting me to speak and for sponsoring the event.

This article does not even contain the words database or MySQL. I still believe it is somewhat interesting.

Mail has, for some reason, always been playing a big role in my life. I have been running mail for two, my girlfriend and me, in 1988. I have been running mail for 20 and 200 people in 1992, setting up a citizens network. Later I designed and built mail systems for 2 000 and 20 000 person corporations, and planned mail server clusters for 200 000 and 2 million users. And just before I became a consultant at MySQL I was working for a shop that did mail for a living for 20 million users.

Mail is a very simple and well defined collection of services. You accept incoming messages to local users, you implement relaying for your local users with POP-before-SMTP and SMTP AUTH, you build POP, IMAP and webmail accesses, and you deploy spam filter systems and virus scanners for incoming and outgoing messages. This services …

Sun enhances multicore support for OpenSolaris. Oracle Enterprise Linux sets price performance benchmark record. Pentaho adds single sign on. (and more)

Sun Tunes Solaris Express Developer Edition for Enhanced Multicore Development, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Oracle Database Standard Edition One and Oracle Enterprise Linux on HP Set New World Record for Price Performance with TPC-C Benchmark, Oracle (Press Release)

Pentaho Enhances Enterprise Security for Open Source Business Intelligence, Pentaho (Press Release)

…

git clone http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/dpm.git

Read the README, read the TODO. If you need a tarball, ask and I'll toss one up, or modify the post hook, or whatever.

What is this?

- A event based network daemon which implements the MySQL 5.0 client/server protocol. It implements the Lua scripting language. The scripting language is used for the meat of the functionality, while all of the common functions are done in C.

Why a preview and not a release?

- Proof that this thing exists, it works, and an example of its scripting API.
- An example to the community that some people do want this, or would find it useful.
- So people may start submitting feedback and patches. I'm fairly good at the theory, networking, blah, but so good at putting …

The admission I'm about to make will likely cause me to lose some friends/colleagues in the open source world, but I have to be honest: I like using Microsoft Windows. Except for Windows 3.0-3.1, I always have. Further, I personally much prefer managing databases on Windows than Unix and will also give Windows the nod over Linux in certain areas. See, I came from managing DB2 on the mainframe to running data warehouses with Teradata on their proprietary platform, and then did a long run with Oracle on UNIX (AIX and HPUX).

MySQL AB today announced that Alcatel-Lucent has successfully implemented its MySQL Cluster Carrier Edition database for its highly mission-critical XDMS application, which will help enable the next generation of converged telecom services.

MySQL 5.1, the next major version, has a bunch of juicy features that many people would like to use in production, if only it were already GA. Partitioning for example, is one of those features that all users want to get their hands on. It is about performance. Partitioning can reduce response times dramatically, if applied correctly. I don't need to convince you of this. You can read one of the several articles about the technicalities of partitions (there is one piece about the performance of partitioned archive tables in this very blog).

The only problem is that …