I have been fairly negative on technology lately, partially because I am fed up with marketing hype (even my own) and partially because I am back as an end-user and consumer of IT products and services. I've also been languishing with the notion that many open source startups are grossly overestimating their potential market size. Then, as I was reading Matt's Finally a real database market, I realized that I was looking at it all wrong--limiting the market opportunity by the relative size that exists now.

The right metric isn't proprietary vs. open, but open vs. open where Microsoft either joins in or gets left behind.

Of databases and enterprise class
I keep wondering why the standard line is to claim MySQL is not enterprise class. Why don't people say that about …

Market: the world of commercial activity where goods and services are bought and sold) "without competition there would be no market"....

Thus spake WordNet. The denotation doesn't state that there must be multiple vendors to make a market, but I think the implication/connotation is there. Whoever heard of a market with just one player? Besides the office productivity suite market, that is. :-)

And so, we heard yesterday that CA is spinning off Ingres to form an independent company. (With a great person - Dave Dargo - to run it. I knew Dave when he was at Oracle, then Olliance. He's a huge asset to the Ingres team.)

My friend and alter-ego, …

Market: the world of commercial activity where goods and services are bought and sold) "without competition there would be no market"....

Thus spake WordNet. The denotation doesn't state that there must be multiple vendors to make a market, but I think the implication/connotation is there. Whoever heard of a market with just one player? Besides the office productivity suite market, that is. :-)

And so, we heard yesterday that CA is spinning off Ingres to form an independent company. (With a great person - Dave Dargo - to run it. I knew Dave when he was at Oracle, then Olliance. He's a huge asset to the Ingres team.)

My friend and alter-ego, …

This series of articles describes how to install and configure the MySQL MaxDB Synchronization Manager. In a step by step approach the author guides you through the process of obtaining, installing, testing, configuring and running MaxDB and the Synchronization Manager.

$ dltest /opt/sdb/programs/lib/libsqlod.so SQLAllocHandle
[dltest] ERROR dlopen: /opt/sdb/programs/lib/libsqlod.so: undefined symbol: _ZTVN10__cxxabiv120__si_class_type_infoE

$ LD_PRELOAD=libstdc++.so.5 dltest /opt/sdb/programs/lib/libsqlod.so SQLAllocHandle

I put this example odbcinst.ini file in /etc, and this example odbc.ini file in my home directory as $HOME/.odbc.ini, and then ran the following:

$ LD_PRELOAD=libstdc++.so.5 isql MailDB dba dba

and voìla! Now to get down to the important bits...

Here is a presentation given at the Open Source Database Conference on November 8, 2005.

Abstract:

Data on Demand is a paradigm of storing data for a data warehouse with huge storage requirements. There are cases where creating statistical tables is not enough, and the detail data should be kept online for long periods. This technique has been applied in cases of MySQL DW associated with industrial production control, saving up to 80% storage space and improving performance and scalability.


Available presentation material:

* open document (OpenOffice 2) [1.3 MB]

* portable document format (pdf) …

Yesterday, me and Arjen arrived in Frankfurt, Germany, to attend the first Opensource Database Conference, which is being held in parallel to the International PHP Conference.

In addition to us two, Kaj, Brian and several members of the MySQL support team will be present and available for questions and comments about MySQL. We also have a booth at the Exhibition floor, so make sure to stop by and say hello!

I already met a lot of new and familiar faces and the conference program looks promising, I look forward to the next two days.

The Opening Keynote has just ended. On Wednesday, I will be giving a talk about …

As much as I wanted to get the competitive advantage and put my proposal ideas in early, there was no chance to work on them until tonight after having wound down some work on another project. The flight home from DC was the perfect time to relax with some music and a mysql> prompt. I almost convinced myself it wasn't worth putting anything in, but then I had this idea and ended up putting in two. I do tend to enjoy conferences a bit more when I don't have to speak and can just soak it all in.

I am thankful for EST's 3 hour advantage over PST. I was on a flight that didn't get to Boston until 12:30am, but still had time to submit the completed proposals before the midnight deadline.

I'll wait to see if either of the ideas are chosen by the selection committee before making any comments about what was in my mind tonight. It may really be just a bunch of rubble. There's definitely one I'm more excited about, but is kind of a wild …

Alfresco, one of the most impressive open source software companies to emerge this year, has now released their open source content management system. This is no simple web management system, but a full blown enterprise content management (ECM) system built on top of a very scalable open source stack that uses the Java Tomcat or JBoss server and MySQL. 

John Newton, the visionary behind Alfresco, was a co-founder of Documentum and he's assembled a team of content management gurus who have built an exceedingly easy-to-use and extensible system.  Having used a few proprietary content management systems in the past, I was blown away with how elegant Alfresco is. 

It will be interesting to see how Alfresco evolves. So far they appear to be doing everything right.  Already they are getting a tremendous number of downloads from corporate customers and integrators …

Recently, I switched my spam blocking software from SpamAssassin , to DSPAM It's pretty cool, it seems to be working better for me. Setup with MySQL was a breeze, the documentation etc was great. Unfortunately, it seems not a lot of people use the WebUI with MySQL. Lots of tutorials on how to make dspam work with email addresses in MySQL. But the WebUI, which people can use to administer their preferences, and quarantine's etc. Relies on http auth. The CGI has no way of authenticating against MySQL, and they really don't mention anything about mod_auth_mysql etc.

So, I wrote a little script that will connect to my mysql db, and create a simple password file, which can be used for authenticating against, via a normal .htaccess.

You can get …