I had organized a session at MySQL camp on Saturday on the above topic. I should say I was one of the guilty ones who had slides for the session in an “unconference“.

Brian Aker (of MySQL) graciously stepped in to answer some questions and provided reasons for some of the design decisions in MySQL OnlineBackup. Some of them are:

• Envelope format for backup archive. This would allow backup as well as recovery to continue in case the storage engines failed to do backup or recovery respectively.

• Block size and envelope format will help in handling tape errors.

• Logical backup will be done in case storage engine does not have online backup API …

Sun has announced today that the Java programming language and runtime environment will be open sourced under the GPL license, the license also used by Linux, MySQL and roughly 70% of all open source projects tracked at Freshmeat.net. 

While Sun's Jonathan Schwartz had previously criticized the GPL license, there's clearly a change of heart here, due to the huge popularity of Linux.  By following the GPL license, Java can now be more readily …

I'm in the middle of working through the agenda for the upcoming Open Source Business Conference (May 22-23, 2007, San Francisco), and wanted to solicit outside input.

OSBC has made great strides for its 2007 show, if for no other reason than I'm actually listening to what other people want on the agenda. :-) OSBC's Advisory Board includes: Larry Augustin, Zack Urlocker (VP of Marketing, MySQL), Bill Hilf (General Manager, Platform Strategy, Microsoft), Mark Radcliffe (Partner, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, LLP), Tim Golden (SVP, Linux Engineering, Bank of America), Andrew Aitken (President, Olliance Group), and Robin Vasan (General Partner, Mayfield).

The board has been very active in shaping the conference, making it into a much more CIO-friendly event than in years past.

You'll see this emphasis in the preliminary (very) draft below of the conference. Some of the sessions …

This is how Marten Mickos (MySQL CEO) described the relationship between MySQL and the open source community at MySQL Camp. MySQL Camp held at Google over last weekend, was an useful opportunity to listen and talk to developers in the broad MySQL ecosystem (including Oracle VP) as well as MySQL users.

The most interesting talk was about the efforts made by MySQL folks to attract and reward MySQL community contributors. They have made significant efforts in this direction - MySQL forge, Planet MySQL, MySQL winter of code, MySQL community server and availability of MySQL work logs (roadmap)

We, at Zmanda, also understand the need to have …

As mentioned in a previous post, the poll for moderating http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mysql/ will be closed soon. At present, the role will be awarded to one volunteer who would like to share the role.

I’ve been using account_location for a couple of applications recently. It’s a really nice way to give individual ‘clients’ of an application their own domain and when we come to scaling up, it’s a really easy way of splitting customers across several hosts. So, yeah, very nice. And it’s dead easy to deploy in the first instance – a couple of DNS records along the lines of:

@ IN A 1.2.3.4
* IN A 1.2.3.4

There you go, every host in that domain points to 1.2.3.4.

However, it’s a pest for setting up in your development environment. OK, so you can edit /etc/hosts and add an entry for every single account you happen to create. This hinders development for me — each domain has to be unique, so whenever I want to create a new account, I have to do so in Rails, …

We're setting new XAMPP versions together and would now ask you to take a look at the beta versions of the upcoming XAMPP release.

New in this version of XAMPP: MySQL (5.0.27), PHP (5.2.0), phpMyAdmin (2.9.1) and a Japanese translation.

XAMPP BETA versions are always for testing purposes only. There will be no upgrade packages from and to beta versions. To all testers: Many thanks in advance!!

Update 18.11.: Since yesterday you also find two new versions of XAMPP for Solaris as XAMPP BETA releases, one for Solaris 10 SPARC, and one for x86. These versions are the last step to finalized releases of XAMPP for Solaris. Both versions are compiled for 64-bit systems.

You find the beta version at our special XAMPP BETA download area.

Monty gave us a quick overview of next generation of MyISAM. It is set to include:

• New data disk format
• Transaction support
• multi-versioning
• row level locking and escalation to table level locks. (interesting)
• bitmap indexes and new table scanning optimizing indexes with up to 1000x times performance.

No details of time frame were given for delivery, however development is well underway.

The news is out that Java is free. I suspect that 20-30 bloggers are going to steal that title (Free as in Java) so I wanted to try to get my blog post out first. Tim Bray has the news and apparently SUN is going to have an announcement on this tomorrow morning.

In a former life I was a major contributor to java.apache.org which was the precursor to Jakarta and participated in Tomcat and Ant when they were released. I was also the lead developer and project founder of Jetspeed and invented the Portlet API *which have now essentially evolved into widgets). I've also contributed to GNU Classpath and GCJ. Long story short I have a vested interest in seeing Java …

The first MySQL Camp is over. A whopping 223 registered attendees, most of whom were overwhelmingly active participants. Plenty of valuable feedback. Constant attention by Ken Jacobs (who assured the audience that “Oracle would never do anything to harm MySQL“), VP of Oracle. Superb Google hosting, facilities, food. Lots of beer by Proven Scaling. Fantastic sessions. What more could one hope for?

Thank you, Google! Thank you, Jay! Thank you, MySQL campers!