There is a huge market for storage products, backup and recovery, data protection and such. In the open source space, only Zmanda seems to be making any progress with the open source approach to this problem. I spoke with Ken Sims and CEO Chander Kant about their new offerings.

Zmanda network launched yesterday and is offering certified versions of Amanda, and support and services similar to the RedHat network model. The pricing will be much lower and easier to understand than traditional storage software. Roughly ~$50-250 per server or workstation. Linux is the primary platform for the solution, but they will be adding more operating systems to the mix over the next year or so.

Amanda has been out since 1991 so its battle tested already and the company has been pleasantly surprised by the number of people using it. "We think our market is the MySQL market. We're adding enhancements …

By tim

In his keynote at today's MySQL Conference, MySQL CEO Marten Mickos reframed Web 2.0 in a lovely way: "The ecosystem is the computer and collaboration is its operating system."

Mike Hillyer?s Personal Web Space » Blog Archive » It?s Alive!!

Mike’s laptop went funny, but he had a backup of his presentation.

So, something about my backup strategy.

I have a policy that anything that I really care about is backed up. If it’s not backed up, I don’t care about it.

e.g. while I’d be sad if my mythtv box suddenly had a disk failure, I can always put in a blank disk and I don’t loose too much.

My email is fetched onto a server at home, and I use offlineimap to keep an up to date (nearly) copy on my laptop. I also, at least weekly, burn the entire thing to DVD (it still fits, when bzip2 compressed).

Also, for all that other stuff that is pretty important (/home), I do a xfsdump to external disk.

I also now (on a paranoid spending trip at Fry’s) have a small …

I spoke with Paola Lubet, VP of Marketing at SolidDB to discuss their recent announcements with MySQL. According to Paola, the major roadblock for OSS databases into mission-critical environments is the real time nature of transactional data. SolidDB has been developing real-time databases for the last 14 years with features that go beyond basic storage (as one might perceive OSS databases to offer). This advanced functionality is common to Oracle etc, but not regularly seen in OSS databases. MySQL is the first open source DB that will feature this functionality. Both camps think that this will help MySQL move deeper into enterprises.

A prototype is available for download now.
Beta is July
Production is planned for Q4.

Dear MySQL User Conference Attendees,

The resources I mentioned to some or many of you are:

• The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - the classic MIT introductory computer science course textbook (and supporting video lectures are here.)
• PHP Vikinger - a PHP-focused unconference held in Norway on June 24 and 25th.
• GPL v3 site - make sure to check out the comments section
• eZ components - well-designed components for PHP web apps that are well-designed, …

“there’s nothing here i can eat for morning tea, could I please get an apple?”

“no”.

fuck.

Today, a few days later than originally planned and after 91 days in beta testing, the new version of XAMPP for Linux and Windows is ready for downloading. The major updates in this version are PHP 5.1.2 and 4.4.2, MySQL 5.0.20, eAccelerator 0.9.4 and phpMyAdmin 2.8.0.3.

Find more details on the specific XAMPP project page.

What an informative session. One of my favorites at the conference.

I am sitting in the session Speeding-up queries by Timour Katchaounov.

Query engine principles

What's new in the 5.0/5.1 engine?

Query engine architecture.
A number of stages in the query engine happen in the parse tree. This is where the SQL standards compliance happens. Access rights are also checked here in Preprocessor. Then we are ready to execute the query in the optimizer.

First are the logical transformations, then cost-based optimization and then plan refinement. Once we have a complete query execution plan, it is sent to query execution component. It uses either table scan or the index scan etc and decides on the various join methods such as nested loops join, hash join etc. Then its passed to the handler API which uses the appropriate storage engine (InnoDB etc).

MySQL …

This is the first official post in my new category: MySQL Tips. Feel free to subscribe to the category-specific RSS feed, if you prefer.

First, for a bit of background information…

In MySQL, access is always granted based on the combination of username and hostname (or IP address, in some cases), and password—for example, jcole@foo.example.bar could be a valid username and hostname combination. As far as I know, this is a historical thing—MySQL authentication is based on username and hostname because it has always been that way.

In order to verify the “network credentials” of the connecting client, MySQL uses a “double reverse-DNS lookup” on the IP of the incoming connection. In short, MySQL first finds out …

I heard Cory Doctorow about a week ago (yes, we have cool international speakers here in Melbourne all the time!), and if there was only one thing you’re really meant to take away from his talk, I think I found the gem.

Cory signs a book

We’re usually told content is king. He says thats a myth. Have you seen the six trillion dollar industry, that is telecommunications? (okay, I don’t know if that stat is remotely correct…) So the content is king idea is bollocks. What is really king is community and inter-personal communication. Getting people to talk about it. Humans are terribly social beings, so yeah, go community.

“Trying to kill MySQL by acquiring open source is like trying to kill
a dolphin by drinking the ocean.” — Marten Mickos

And yes, that quote ties in well with the …