By tim

Yesterday, I talked about the overall market trend in computer books versus last year. As always, though, the opportunities and interesting tidbits are in the category visualizations we do. Here's a treemap view of the quarter on quarter differences between Q2 of 2006 and the same period last year:

As I've previously described in Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator, in a Treemap visualization, the size of a square indicates the relative size of the category, and its color indicates the rate of change. A category that is bright green is up significantly. One that is bright red is heading strongly in the other direction. Colors …

I just discover MySQL Contributor License Agreement. I don’t know who has invented this:

If we accept and maintain your contribution, and it is deemed of material value to the Project, your benefit is that we relieve you of the burden of maintaining your contribution and will provide you attribution in the GA release notes unless you ask not to be mentioned. You also may select two of the following items: a MySQL Press book, a MySQL shirt, a US $100 rebate to a conference or training class, or a US $100 donation to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) by MySQL AB.

My personal opinion is that this will work against MySQL. This is not motivation, but de-motivation. I will not contribute, under this conditions, do you?

More info here.

In the previous article I discussed using Read Replication Clustering to scale out reads for a website. What I will now do is describe a refined approach to the problem of scaling by creating "Application Clusters with Replication".

A common approach to website design is that a web designer creates a website and decides that search is a feature that they want to implement. If they use the MyISAM engine this means that they can add fulltext indexes to their tables and then make use of them in queries. I will ignore the case where the developer decides that an unanchored LIKE clause is an appropriate solution, since this developer will quickly hit a wall on performance and will need to learn what a fulltext index is.

So the developer adds a fulltext and is good to go? Sounds like an easy solution?

If the site the developer has written begins to see significant traffic then one of three things will occur. …

This article explains how I replaced file-based methods to ensure only one running instance of a program with MySQL’s GET_LOCK function. The result is mutual exclusivity that works in a distributed environment, and it’s dead simple to implement. My current employer used to use a technique similar to the classic Perl ‘Highlander’ method to ensure only one instance of a certain program would run at any given time. The method was to create a file with a certain name and then get an exclusive, non-blocking lock on the file with the flock() call.

So, dinner tonight will start with appetizers at the Cantina restaurant at the DoubleTree Hotel. MySQL was nice enough to have an entire reception just for me…..just kidding! However, that’s where I’ll be — since I told folks to watch this space, I wanted to make sure eveyrone knew where I’d be.

Also, I’d like to point out that there’s an obvious error in an algorithm on planetmysql.com, because it lists me as the #1 top poster.

One thing I have been really impressed with Portland, Oregon, so far is the excellent light rail system they have serving the downtown area. There is a noticeable difference between Columbus and Portland in both the level of air pollution and the amount of traffic congestion (extremely low) in the downtown area because of free light rail service in the downtown area for all. This is something I really wish that Columbus will have implemented. Columbus spent around 29 million dollars over the last five to seven years "investigating" a light rail solution (that they later said was unrealizable). Such a shame. The Portland downtown is a shining example of what can be done when people put their minds together and work towards a set of environmentally friendly, yet economically viable, goals. Kudos to the city of Portland.

Anyway, I had a great time last night having dinner with a bunch of MySQLers at a local Portland …

I'm listening to Scott Yara talk about Greenplum's commercialization of the PostgreSQL database, and comparing it to what Paul Weinstein (EVP, Business Development, MySQL). I had always viewed the two projects - MySQL and PostgreSQL - as direct competitors, and figured both were also competing with DB2 and Oracle. This is clearly not the case, at least, not for these two companies.

Who does MySQL compete with? With no one. Marten is on the record as saying that

We continue to have most of our deployments in areas where there was no database before. Either the application didn't use a database earlier, or the application is new. We are now seeing more and more migrations from old …

I have been trying to compile super-smack, a benchmarking tool for MySQL, on a Solaris 10 box but compiling super-smack fails with the following message(s):

###################
[root@db:/home/me/benchmarking/super-smack-1.3] ./configure --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql
checking for a BSD-compatible install... ./install-sh -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... no
checking for working aclocal... missing
checking for working autoconf... missing
checking for working automake... missing
checking for working autoheader... missing
checking for working makeinfo... missing
checking for sh... /bin/bash
checking for gcc... no
checking for cc... cc
checking for C compiler default output file name... configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.
…

Fabrizio has one of the best posts I've yet seen on open source licensing. It's one of the most candid posts I've ever seen on open source licensing (and candor is something all software companies need - open and closed).

Fabrizio traces the contours of open source licensing, honing in on dual licensing strategies. He astutely observes that a dual-license strategy works well for MySQL (or a product that is embeddable), because there the "trigger" is clear: you either pay your way out of the GPL (or similarly restrictive license) or you contribute code back. Simple.

Open source applications, as Fabrizio notes, are different. There is no obvious trigger (You'll need to read Fabrizio's post to discover the non-obvious trigger that he comes up with) for either contributing back or buying. So what do you do?

In Alfresco's case, …