The morning keynote session (at MySQL UC 2006) starts with some business from Arjen. Interesting to note that when he askes for a show of hands from people who are here for the first time there were a lot of hands. I'd guess 25% of the folks attending this morning raised their hands. Also a lot of folks who are back for their 2nd year.

Kaj Arno says registration is over 1500 attendees, pretty good. That's close to the numbers for OSCON just a fwe years back.

Yesterday, at the MySQL Users Conference 2006, Eric Bergen and I held a half-day tutorial on Replication for Scaling and High Availability. It went great! We had about 130 people, in my estimation—a full house!

I’ve put the slides online (2mb pdf, 650k ppt) for everyone interested in the content! Enjoy!

While many people will be blogging about the conference sessions and MySQL features, functionality and sessions, I thought it would be important to raise awareness of the creativity of developers often lost during the product lifecycle.

I met at the Speakers Function last night Jim Starkey, the founder of Netfrastructure, Inc, a company aquired by MySQL recently. At the conference was the official launch of a new transactional storage engine to be included in the MySQL 5.1 release is codenamed “Falcon”.

Too often, the flare and creativity of products, and also the initial history is lost when it reaches the marketing department of an organisation. In this case, after talking with Jim, we decided it was important to ensure the name “Falcon” remains. Why should the name conform to something generic, and quick frankly boring. So please join me.

Save The Falcon!

Last week I did a podcast on trouble shooting MySQL, it was done in conjunction with Splunk so it has a bit of information about them as well.
You can find both the written text, which I have not checked for accuracy, and of course the audio:

http://www.splunk.com/index.php/articles/news/311

And yes for those who know me, I really should just set up one of my own.... I just need Eric to get back in town to be the bartender.
Since you need a bartender right?

It should be also noted that showing up can win you stuff. Mikal did a survey thing ore something and his name has been flashing up on the screen saying he’s won stuff. Don’t know if he knows yet :)

I’ve been working on a new project to fulfill a specific need: consistent, fast, cheap, and flexible backups for MySQL, for all storage engines1. To that end I’m creating a tool called dbsnapper—a plugin-based backup tool. The tool itself is very basic and handles a few jobs: getting configuration information from the user, running through a “run sheet” of different configurable tasks, and reporting status and errors to the user.

The tasks then—the actual backup steps—are fully configurable, via plugins. In fact, the whole process isn’t even MySQL specific, and can potentially be used for PostgreSQL2 and other database as well. Remember the requirements for backups (above):

• Consistent—We need to do some locking inside MySQL to make sure that the backups are consistent, for both MyISAM and InnoDB tables. This generally means the FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK command.
• Fast—There …

“Not good to hear Monty arguing with Brian…”

I've been watching the ruminations surrounding Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss with lively interest. Most of the past 5-10 years have been spent wondering how to beat Microsoft. Now, it seems, the struggle is to beat Red Hat...

...and it hasn't even won yet. :-)

It is testament to Red Hat's success that the Financial Times reports that Oracle has considered buying Novell. Stephe rightly points out that Oracle is not a middleware provider, per se, and so should not feel overly threatened by Red Hat's acquisition. Yet it clearly does.

Why? Because there's nothing more terrifying to a closed-source vendor, no matter where it sits in the software stack, than an aggressive, hungry, and successful open source player. Success …

Jonathan Schwartz has been promoted to CEO at Sun Microsystems as co-founder Scott McNealy leaves the CEO post after 22 years to become chairman.  McNealy's colorful style sometimes put him at odds with Microsoft, Intel and other industry giants, and some accuse him of not moving fast enough to adapt Sun's strategy and workforce to the challenges of the post Internet boom of the 21st centry.  Rumors had been floating about McNealy's departure recently and despite negative comments around Sun's recent financial losses, overall this is a good move for Sun. 

In the last few years, Schwartz has become considerable force inside of Sun, leading the charge of Sun's software strategy and their push to open source.  His promotion to COO was seen as a likely step towards taking over the reigns from McNealy at some point.  …

I'm putting together an Executive Radar event with Tim O'Reilly for this year's OSCON in Portland, Oregon. One of the sessions actually has me somewhat sleepless (literally - I'm typing this at 5:17 AM...), and results from a seemingly innocuous blog post Tim had a few weeks back.

Open Source and the Future of Asymmetric Competition
For years the software industry has largely competed on the basis of symmetry: Oracle versus IBM in databases; BEA versus IBM in application servers; etc. Feature wars, price wars, but not true competition wars. That is, competing by playing a different game, with different rules. Open source enables an alternative battleground upon which to compete, with community, code, and culture the new competitive tools. This session brings …