In addition to launching RHEL 5 earlier this week, Red Hat previewed their forthcoming online marketplace Red Hat Exchange, or RHX.  While no date has been announced, Red Hat has identified an initial set of partners which includes a who's who of leading commercial open source companies such as Alfresco, JasperSoft, MySQL, Pentaho, SugarCRM, Zimbra and Zmanda, among others. Under the Red Hat Exchange, customers will be able to buy support subscriptions for these products directly from Red Hat's web site giving newer companies direct access to Red Hat's installed base. And for Red Hat customers, they get the proverbial "one throat to choke" ensuring compatibility and integrated support. 

RHX is the brainchild of long-time Red Hat employees Matt Mattox and Mike Evans and I expect more details will be coming in the months that follow.  But in case …

I was reading a couple of items on gapingvoid

• the hughtrain
• the porous membrane: why corporate blogging works

which inspired me to use our blog for a conversation with our customers (and with potential Pythian DBAs) about what it’s like to work with Pythian.

What exactly does an on-site DBA get from working with Pythian Remote DBAs?

1. Sleep.
2. Support: phone, IM or email some who either knows how to help or knows someone who knows how to help.
3. Teammates: You can delegate tasks which are either too hard or too easy onto Pythian.
4. Accountability. Every minute, every hour is documented for all to see, internally and by individual clients.
5. Understanding: Someone who knows what being a DBA is like.

You are on-site. Picture the Pythian on-call team standing behind …

Schon wieder diese langweilige CMS-Seite, die du zum tausendsten Mal bauen musst? Das Gefühl zu haben, nicht richtig mit dem KnowHow vorwärts zu kommen, vielleicht weil du auch alleine als Freelancer unterwegs bist, es aber schöner wäre, mit Kollegen zusammen zu arbeiten und sich gegenseitig mit KnowHow zu befruchten? Das muss nicht sein, denn Mayflower sucht DICH.

An unseren Standorten in München und Würzburg entwickeln wir Highend Anwendungen für Intranet und Internet. Beispiele:

• Deutschlands größtes Video on Demand Projekt auf Basis von OXID e-Sales, mit DRM-, SOA- und Payment-Anbindung
• Die Fernparametrisierung von Heizanlagen mit intelligenter Datenanalyse und Anbindung an …

unixODBC has had support for UNICODE for quite some time but UNICODE was never implemented in the installer and setup layers. Nick has been working to implement this recently and I have been testing it out during MySQL C/ODBC v5 development.

I have been creating a new look & feel for the unixODBC web site which I hope will get used once its complete. This also involves cleaning up, updating, and enhancing some of the documentation.

Oh; almost forgot. Nick and I both had some work to get the Qt3 code to support being built in Qt4… Nick got to the finish line first

The Connectors team at MySQL has been reorganized and includes additional resources. It seemed fitting to have a meeting for those working on C/ODBC v5.

We had a week long meeting in Germany at a place called Bad Herrenalb (since 4 of the new resources are living in Germany).

By the end of the meeting we had a revised development plan in place with tasks assigned and target dates set.

More resources have been allocated to the Connectors team at MySQL and most of them are focused on either C/ODBC v3 bug fixs or C/ODBC v5 development.

The folks working on C/ODBC v3 have been knocking off bugs at speedy pace. The Engineering team have been lending their time as well by taking over the build-to-release process. Still others are working on improving QA by adding new tests and creating a new automated process to run them.

This work has resulted in a new release of C/ODBC v3.

So far, the MySQL Server RPM packages as provided by MySQL AB used to automatically start the mysqld process after the package has been installed. It has been like that since the very beginning and we think of it as a convenience for our users when they want to get up and running quickly.

However, Kristian raised an interesting point in BUG#27072 where he points out that automatically starting mysqld during the RPM installation might not always be the desired behaviour, especially in automatic installation environments or during a fresh installation (where the system might not be fully configured yet). Therefore he proposes to change this behaviour to not start mysqld as part of the installation.

While I personally agree with his proposal, this is of course a tricky decision: our users are familiar with …

These two builds represent a major milestone for Virtual Appliances- they are the first appliances we have released that have shell access enabled!

That’s right! For everybody who asked for shell access, it is now enabled! Tasks such as migrating existing Cacti data, adding/editing cronjobs, or editing the php.ini file in the LAMP VA are now easily possible using the shell.

Other new/improved features include:

• Improved networking configuration - now supports static routes (user requested feature)
• Cacti VA exports pseudo-root filesystem containing scripts and resource directory from Cacti installation. This allows end-user installed Cacti plugins & extensions.
• Cacti VA is now an easily expandable two virtual hard disk configuration, which allows for simple expansion to accomodate polling more data for large sites.
• Updated PHP, MySQL, and other binaries.
…

This is a distilled version of the talk I gave at the phpug Dortmund in March. I'll concentrate on the High Availability aspect here but I won't leave out Load Balancing completely. Also, this is in English while the talk was in German.

High Availability and Load Balancing

High Availability and Load Balancing are often used in combination if not synonymous which is as wrong as it can get. They certainly do have some things in common (several machines do something) and they are often needed at similar times (when a website becomes more important) but the fundamental ideas are quite different.

While Load Balancing spreads incoming http requests over several machines this is not a highly available setup. High Availability …

Proven Scaling will sponsor three people to attend the MySQL Conference and Expo 2007 in Santa Clara, California, April 23-26!

That’s right, we will pay for your airfare and hotel, transport from the airport, and even a stipend for meals! MySQL AB has graciously provided us with conference passes for the Free Ride winners, so the winners will each receive a full conference pass.

Go to Proven Scaling Free Ride to enter. The deadline is midnight PDT (GMT-7), Friday March 23rd (just over a week away), so do it soon!

I look forward to reading your entries — and I hope to see you there!