Sorry to have been dark for the last couple of months. Things have been very busy indeed for the Zimbra team, but it is gratifying to have some of our longer-term engineering efforts baring fruit: in addition to the release of 4.5 (more info here) and opening up our product management portal for your input, we have now posted the beta release of our software appliance distribution for ZCS!

Software appliances promise to augment Software as a Service (SaaS) as an easier, cheaper way to use third-party software, especially by lowering the cost of managing independently changing subcomponents of a software "stack"---application logic, database, web application server, virtual machine, operating system, and so on. For our 1.0 software appliance, …

I was fortunate enough to be invited to beta test Windows Home server.  This is the new Microsoft product that looks to provide centralized storage and backup for the ever-growing number of home networks.  I have been too busy to do much with it so far but here's what I can tell you so far.

• The connector will complain that it can't install on Vista x64.  To fix this, simply move the .DAT file that is on the connector cd to your desktop and change it's extension to .MSI.  Then, open an elevated command prompt and run the MSI file.  It will install without trouble.  I did notice some oddity about shared folders so I'm not guaranteeing that it works perfectly but so far it's been ok here.
• At first it seems like a lot of noise about nothing when you see the shared folders appear on your desktop.  I was thinking "crap, I can do that with XP".  Well, not so fast.  These shared folders …

I’m listening to the first MySQL University session. It’s the highest form of education available at MySQL AB, hence the name. Not about how to use MySQL, but how to write code patches for MySQL.

Right now, Sergei Golubchik is sitting in Cologne, Germany, speaking behind Skype Conferencing and two pillows (sound quality!) about memory management and mysys libraries and algorithms. Monty and others are assisting Sergei over our internal IRC, where there are 31 developers listening in.

Our presenter, Sergei Golubchik, in a non-virtual setting

Here’s an IRC transcript:

monty|uni ie, only destructior is called, memory is not freed until free_root()
rafal|school monty|uni: if I initialize String from other String, or char table[] …

I’ve been following the development of the PBXT storage engine for some time, but only recently got the chance to get my hands dirty with the engine. I have to say - I like what I see! Paul McCullagh (PBXT’s creator) has done a great job creating a stellar transactional engine for MySQL, and the new beta sports foreign keys that work like a champ.

Check out the article I just wrote on PBXT - I think you’ll be excited too once you see all that PBXT offers and the performance it delivers. Paul has also started making binaries of the plugin-engine available, which makes it even easier to pop PBXT into a version of MySQL and run.

Check PBXT out when you can - like me, I think you’ll quickly be turned into a fan.

About a week ago, I wrote about the upcoming Certification for MySQL Cluster and that you can take the exam at the MySQL Conference and Expo. I promised then to write some more about why we are offering this certification and also about the cluster certification study guide.
Cluster Certification, Why?
MySQL just released the MySQL Carrier Grade Edition, which is a special edition of MySQL Cluster that is especially targeted at the telecom market. A large number of people attended an …

This week I spoke with Jay Pipes about the upcoming MySQL Conference, April 23-26 in Santa Clara, California, USA.

Direct play the podcast here:
http://tinyurl.com/2jvnfe

Subscribe to the podcast by clicking:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=206806301

You can Direct download all the oursql podcasts at:
http://technocation.org/podcasts/oursql/

I had a setting wrong in my recording program and ended up having a very different sound quality than what I had wanted. I played with it as much as I could, but I apologize for the bad quality audio, especially the breathing that you can hear, the mouse clicks, and when you can hear me swallow …

I spoke with Zmanda CEO Chander Kant last week about the company's growth and some new things they have been working on. I first met Chander at the MySQL conference about a year ago. Since then the company has expanded its support for MySQL and is now starting to target other applications like Oracle and SAP.

Today Zmanda announced a program that I think is an interesting marketing move.

Beginning March 1st and through April 15th of 2007, the leader in open source backup Zmanda will offer existing Veritas NetBackup customers the ability to switch to its brand new Amanda Enterprise Edition 2.6 with Zmanda Management Console for free!

Simply show your Zmanda Account Manager the current renewal quote for Veritas NetBackup and Zmanda will set you up with a year long subscription …

By Allison Randal

Tim and I had a great conversation with Andy Astor of EnterpriseDB last week. EnterpriseDB is a drop-in replacement for Oracle, based on the PostgreSQL codebase. Rather than forking the code, they've developed their product as a collection of extensions on top of PostgreSQL, and their releases track the latest version of the public code. They contribute patches back to the core in the virtuous cycle of benefit->contribute->benefit. They hire several developers to work on PostgreSQL (6, last I heard), and are among the largest donators to PostgreSQL.org. They're a significant open source success story as a viable and growing competitor to the largest commercial database on the market. And yet, they've met a mixed response in the community: enthusiasm for their contributions and participation, but …

I’ve updated MySQL Query Profiler, which I consider the most important tool I’ve written. It’s now included as part of the MySQL Toolkit project on Sourceforge. The updates are mainly small bug fixes, and I reviewed the documentation as well. Since I’ve been using it for a while and didn’t change much, I have decided to release it as version 1.0.0. At some point I may extend it to address the new storage engines being developed for MySQL 5.

I’ve just released MySQL Duplicate Key Checker on SourceForge. This is a complete rewrite of a tool I initially released under a slightly different name. It is now much more powerful and friendlier to use, especially for scripting, and has many more options. As with the MySQL Table Checksum tool, it is part of MySQL Toolkit. What’s new I’ve redesigned the program from the ground up to be more UNIX-friendly.