The aims of this kind of blog post is simple – I want to help keep the masses informed as to what’s happening with MariaDB, as a whole. There is a community growing, and MariaDB is a community project, not necessarily a Monty Program Ab baby (and we’re clear on this distinction: think of it like Canonical/Ubuntu). So, think of it as such that I’m sharing the good news, and summarising what’s been happening, to save you time.

MariaDB added to the Debian/Ubuntu wishlists
One of MariaDB’s goals is that it should be easily available for download. While we provide binaries and source at the MariaDB download page, we would love to see the binaries sitting in Linux distributions. So it is definitely good to see that it is on …

WordPress Foundation formed. Reaction to Oracle-Sun approval. And more.

WordPress Foundation formed
# Matt Mullenwag launched the WordPress Foundation.

Reaction to Oracle-Sun’s EC approval
# In a memo Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz encouraged the company’s employees to emotionally resign from Sun.

# EnterpriseDB and PostgreSQL co-founder Bruce Momjian issued a statement on the EC’s decision to approve Oracle-Sun.

# Mike Hogan …

I already mentioned this repository several times on my blog. It is the repository where I’m trying to keep bleeding edge stuff for MySQL. I’ve been updating it recently and we’ve got new package there and some interesting updates I want to mention.

MariaDB and MySQL

First thing to mention is that this repository contains MariaDB builds. MariaDB is fork of MySQL and their goals are certainly interesting. For list of differences, try upstream page. As I consider it interesting, I’m keeping eye on it Maybe our users may benefit from it. But currently it is also a source of possible problems in this repository as it contains MySQL as well. I tried to modify both …

It’s been some time already since I informed you about server: database: UNSTABLE repository in openSUSE Build Service. Today I want to mention what is going on there. As the name of the repository suggests, it’s probably not the best idea to use anything from here on your production servers

MySQL 5.4

I’m keeping there MySQL 5.4. Currently in version 5.4.3 beta. 5.4 branch of MySQL contains some patches to improve performance. That is the reason why it might be interesting. Downside is that it isn’t released as often as 5.1 and it is not considered production ready. I already wrote …

We are going to release openSUSE 11.2 soon, so I want to let you know about one problem you may expect. One of the openSUSE 11.2 features is support for ext4. Well, if you will just click on next all the time during the installation, default filesystem for your root partition will be ext4. What is the problem with that? Well, ext4 in current kernel has barriers enabled by default. It’s not a problem, it’s a feature, but it has some unpleasant side effects which you may encounter. Let’s take a closer look.

Barriers

Barriers are used to make sure that journal is really written to your filesystem and that nothing is missing. It has one big advantage – your data are safe. On the other hand it has disadvantage as well. You have to make sure that everything is written so you can’t really take full advantage of all caches and such. There is a nice article on LWN.net …

Red Hat round-up. EC to review Oracle-Sun. Dedicated Ubuntu support. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Red Hat announcements round-up
Red Hat announced a whole heap of products and projects this week. They should have organized an event to coincide with all the announcements. Or something. The biggest news was probably the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 including KVM and other virtualization capabilities, while Red Hat and HP partnered to optimize Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for HP BladeSystem Matrix. The company also revealed that Red Hat Network Satellite …

Peter Fenton’s open source investment tips. Boxee raises $6m. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

*451 CAOS Links will return on August 25*

Digesting the VMware-SpringSource deal
In the wake of VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource the WSJ examined Peter Fenton’s open source investment portfolio and what he looks for in an open source vendor. Meanwhile Matt Asay noted that VMware’s purchase of SpringSource is the first big acquisition of a company based on an Apache license, while Charles Babcock reported …

Some of you may already notice, that in Build Service, there are already available rpms for new MySQL 5.1. Currently I think that in openSUSE 11.2 will be some 5.1 version of MySQL. So it may be interesting to tell our users what will change and how. Most of these changes are reflected in README.SuSE, but frankly – who reads READMEs?

Changes Plugins

One of the new features in MySQL 5.1 is support for plugins. So some of the storage engines will be now shipped like that. Following plugins will be available:

• archive
• blackhole
• federated
• example

As you can see, InnoDB will be still compiled as internal part of MySQL. If you are upgrading from version 5.0.X or if this is your first installation of MySQL 5.1, all plugins will be enabled by default and you can disable them manually later (see …

This is a first entry on my new blog. Maybe the first statement can be just “First post!!!”, but I want to tell my potential readers why this blog was founded, what’s its purpose and what you can hopefully find here in the future.

The original reason to create this blog was to have some place where I can post my ideas about my work. I’m currently working as a package maintainer in SuSE and sometimes I’m facing some things that I think people should know about. But who reads mailing lists nowadays? If I’ll be good at blogging, I’ll be googleable and therefore these idea may actually find some audience. Well, other thing is that my first goal is to get aggregated on Planet SuSE, once this site will be finished enough.

While I was thinking about this stuff, I realized that this may be a good opportunity to create some personal pages about myself too. Well, everyone wants a little bit of attention and I’ll probably want …

Earlier this week I posted how OpenJDK was knock, knock, knockin' on Lenny's door.  At that time I also mentioned how it was already in Ubuntu and Fedora.

What I failed to mention, however, and was right under my very nose was that fact that OpenJDK had already made it into OpenSUSE 11.  Thanks to MySQL Euro-community manager and former SUSE employee Lenz Grimmer, I was …