I'm flying back from Alfresco's quarterly management meeting, and looking through some of the data shared by the team. We're just one company in a rising tide of open source companies, so I'm not sure how much to infer from our numbers about open source, generally, but I thought I'd share, anyway. Perhaps the data will be useful for you, too, as you plan your own open source business.

A few points:

1. Lead Generation. Alfresco's website (Downloads/product trials) drives 72% of our leads, and documentation drives another 21%. Cold calls from sales people, direct mail, email, Google Adwords, and other sources you might imagine...almost nothing. To be fair, we don't really do direct mail or email campaigns yet, so it's not surprising that these bring in few leads.

   But we found (as SugarCRM and MySQL found before us) that PR, which leads to visits to our website …

Welcome to the 22nd edition of Log Buffer, a weekly compendium of postings and news from database-related blogs across the Internet.

Starting things off with a bang is Peter Zaitsev and his MySQL Performance Blog where he records his observations on a  recent set of benchmarks for both MySQL and PostgreSQL. He offers some comments on the InnoDB concurrency scaling issue that some might not be aware of (as indicated in the comments).  Dropping in for Database Soup, Josh Berkus also takes a look at the same set of benchmarks in …

Ok, so the help wanted slogan on a McDonald’s seems ironically bogus, but here at my new job it really applies. I’m coming up on six months with OmniTI and really enjoy my job. Good pay working for good people, who happen to be looking for even more good people.

There are currently openings for the following:

• Oracle DBA
• Software engineer
• Web developers
• Security Analyst
• Developer

C developers are especially wanted. There’s good pay, benefits, etc and you work for a really …

Brian Kelley has published Log Buffer #22, the weekly review of database blogs, on SQLServerCentral.com blogs. In upcoming weeks, Log Buffer will be published by Sheeri Kritzer on The MySQL She-BA; and by Lenz Grimmer. Read the Log Buffer homepage for more detail and to see how you can get in on the act.

Continuent ships new uni/cluster for MySQL and uni/cluster for PostgreSQL solutions, Continuent (Press Release)

Open-Xchange Announces Partnership with MySQL AB, Open-Xchange (Press Release)

OpenReports Releases OpenReports 2.1, OpenReports (Press Release)

Survey Finds Red Hat Customers Willing To Stay With Company if it Cuts Prices, SeekingAlpha, Eric Savitz (Article)

Mission Accomplished: Do We Need the New OSDL?, Linux Magazine, Bryan Richard (Article)

…

Daniel Nichter has released version 3.0 of mysqlreport, one of my favorite tools for quickly comprehending the overall state of a MySQL server. The new version prints out the most important information about InnoDB. It looks like this: $ perl mysqlreport --innodb-only MySQL 5.0.26-standard-l uptime 3 9:57:51 Fri Dec 8 17:29:07 2006 __ InnoDB Buffer Pool __________________________________________________ Usage 1.25G of 1.25G %Used: 100.00 Read ratio 0.002 Pages Free 1 %Total: 0.

Here are some common SQL problems, all of which have related solutions: how do I find the most recent log entry for each program? How do I find the most popular item from each category? How do I find the top score for each player? In general, these types of "select the extreme from each group" queries can be solved with the same techniques. I'll explain how to do that in this article, including the harder problem of selecting the top N entries, not just the top 1.

I had a lovely dinner the other night with Nick McGrath, the head of Microsoft's UK platform strategy. (I can say words like "lovely" because I'm in London this week. I'll therefore also throw in the words "bloke," "top of the morning, guv'nuh!", and "Arsenal.") For all the bile I spill over Microsoft (and there is very good reason for it), I continue to be impressed by the company, as reflected in its people. I've yet to meet anyone in Microsoft's Linux frontline (aka, the counterinsurgency :-) that I don't respect and genuinely like: Nick, Jason Matusow, Bill Hilf, Martin Taylor (before he left Microsoft), Steve Mutkoski, Gutierrez, etc. Great, capable people.

What I like most about Microsoft is the intelligence it brings to bear on its competition. While many enterprise software companies persist in cramming their heads …

Digital music sales seem to have peaked, as Nick Carr highlights on his blog, and as the WSJ recently reported. [Subscription required.] For this reason, EMI is beginning to experiment with non-DRM protected music files: MP3s.

For many in the music business, the sky is about to fall. Or so they think. "Why will anyone buy our wares if we don't force them to do so by preventing copying?!?"

What they don't realize is that the people who don't buy from them won't buy from them, DRM or no. The people that aren't thieves (and that's most of us) will, but convenience of purchase is key. I don't buy from iTunes because I can't get the files elsewhere. I buy from iTunes because it's a safe, super-convenient experience …