Alfresco, the leading (or maybe even only!) supplier of open source enterprise content management software has received an additional $8 million in venture capital investment through Mayfield Fund and Accel Partners.  Alfresco is a sign of the growing scope of open source throughout the enterprise.  A few years back people questioned whether open source had a role beyond the operating system.  Sure, a few hackers would run Linux, but...

Now it's clear that open source is not only significant in IT infrastructure, but there's a growing role for open source applications, including content management, CRM, business intelligence, collaboration and email.  More and more companies are building enterprise grade applications on the LAMP stack and that will further drive the adoption of open source applications and infrastructure.

Congrats guys!  …

I thought it would be fun, and informative to conduct some interviews with web developers on my blog. I'm starting off with someone that most of my blog readers probably already know, and many have probably even had a beer with - Sean Corfield.

If you don't know Sean, he was the Director of IT Architecture at Macromedia. Sean has had a diverse career including eight years involved with the ISO C++ standardization committee.

More recently Sean has been deeply involved in the ColdFusion community as a speaker at conferences, contributor to mailing lists, and more. Sean lead the team that built macromedia.com using ColdFusion and Flash, it is one of the most trafficked web sites in the world.

You can read more about Sean on his website.

Let's get on to the interview

What …

Yesterday I ran into an old collegue that now runs quite a successful computer store chain and highly successful web store here in Australia. Long story short he was having some MySQL problems, so I offered to pass my eye over it. Now, given that they had some data corruption in stock levels not being correct (e.g. getting to an inventory count of -1), my first split second thought was inappropiate transaction management.

In thinking last night, what would I do as part of auditing an existing MySQL Installation and application quickly for reference and also to highlight issues etc, assuming I would have no access to any administrators or developers.

So what would you do? I made some preliminary notes, here’s the full account of what I did do.

Audit Steps

OS Specifics

$ mkdir /tmp/arabx
$ cd /tmp/arabx
# keep a quick copy of stuff
$ script
# Linux generals
$ hostname
$ uname -a
$ uptime
$ …

Thanks for all the great feedback on my "My personal ToDo list for MySQL" article. I hope that developers read this article and all its comments and try to solve these issues as soon as possible. There are some great new suggestions from Roland Bouman and Giuseppe Maxia which add perfectly to the bugs and feature requests that I wrote about.

There's another idea for a feature request (which I think is also already filed): DATETIME and TIMESTAMP could support milliseconds - that's also something that I found was criticized by people who migrated from other database systems.

Generally, people who try to migrate from other database systems to MySQL might be good suggestors for features or what could …

What with the hoopla around the possible JBoss (and other) acqusitions in the near term, it set me to thinking about how open source companies should be valued. Once they "grow up," of course, like Red Hat, they're valued in a somewhat rational (P/E) fashion.

But how does one value the frontier of open source business models? How does one value downloads? (I remember Kevin Harvey of Benchmark and David Skok at Matrix both telling me that part of their investment calculus in open source companies/projects hinges on downloads, but how do these factor into an acquisition?) Do downloads equal "community" and, if so, is "community" something that can be valued? (In my conversations with IBM, they certainly seemed to think so, though they didn't share with me how they'd do so.)

And what about …

Mike Hillyer has released the newest version of the Sakila sample database. One of the things that I wanted to highlight is a technique that Mike demonstrates through his use of triggers to cascade update and delete operations from an InnoDB table to a MyISAM table.

As many of you are aware, the InnoDB storage engine does not support the very useful FULLTEXT indexes which are unique to the MyISAM storage engine. Unfortunately, the MyISAM storage engine does not currently support foreign key contraints or transactional safety. So, what happens when you want to enforce data integrity through the InnoDB storage engine, but still want the capacity to use MyISAM's FULLTEXT ability? Until MySQL 5.0, you were reduced to writing application-level code to handle the writing of textual fields to a duplicated MyISAM table whenever the primary entity in an InnoDB …

The flight I am on is delayed and they have us sitting in the plane while they fix something on the plane.

So what do I do? Pop open the laptop, fire up DUN and start pulling down email. My phone just became my connection to the world.

Why does Cingular suck? Because they disable DUN on the Treo's they ship. My current email reading, web surfing lifestyle is all made possible by a warranty voiding approach that I found that allowed me to enable a feature they decided they didn't want their customers to have. If you buy a phone from Cingular you get a phone that they have hacked up to remove features that they don't want you to have.

And what would be the story if you bought your phone on your own and skipped buying it from Cingular?

You would get this feature built it.

Cingular sucks. I live for the day of the Wi-MAX revolution where we can see the death of the closed phone …

These are my first impressions of MySQL WorkBench 1.0.1. Rant and rave you may say, but a new user, or an experienced modeller would probably observe these points. Also, given that (with a poll?) I suspect a good number of users will be previous DBDesigner users, some level of functionality that may not be considered initially in a new product, should be considered for this migration path of legacy users.

I’ll take the time to review the Forums adding my points, and review Bug System but for now, just blogging is easier.

Conclusion

Note: Generally a conclusion is at the bottom, but I’d suspect most readers will switch off …

MySQL V5.0 has been out for a while; it addresses most of the major objections people have had about ?MySQL is not a ?real? database?. With support for triggers, stored procedures, views and XA transactions, I think MySQL has a feature set that will enable people to easily migrate to MySQL. At this point in time, InnoDB is the only storage engine choice for applications that require transactions, and this is still a reasonable choice in most cases.

The only thing that?s still missing from MySQL is resolution of the problems created by Oracle’s acquisition of Innobase Oy, the developers of the InnoDB storage engine. I previously wrote a post about the Oracle Innobase issues; have a look here. Oracle’s acquisition of Innobase Oy is a problem because Innobase Oy has a proprietary transactionally consistent backup tool that Oracle could withhold to cause pain for MySQL customers. …

Hi All;

Ok, Sakila Schema 0.4 is available at http://www.openwin.org/mike/download/sakila-schema-0.4.sql and is considered a final release.

Any help with creating views and stored procedures is appreciated, along with any requests/advice for the sample data to populate this.

Hopefully I can get a full, final version out soon on the MySQL site.