The latest from the MySQL community

I was reading another post comparing the different forks of MySQL (disclaimer: my employer), and again it seemed to me the term “fork” is somewhat imprecise. I agree with Morgan Tocker that “delta” does not capture these other creatures either – after all, isn’t a delta what makes a fork not a copy?

Wikipedia cites Eric Raymond‘s definition that “The most important characteristic of a fork is that it spawns competing projects that cannot later exchange code, splitting the potential developer community”, but also notes “However, this is not …

1. Tsung -- GPLed multi-protocol (HTTP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, WebDAV, SOAP, XMPP) load tester written in Erlang.
2. Myth of China's Manufacturing Prowess -- The latest data shows [...] that the United States is still the largest manufacturer in the world. In 2008, U.S. manufacturing output was $1.8 trillion, compared to $1.4 trillion in China (UN data. China’s data do not separate manufacturing from mining and utilities. So the actual Chinese manufacturing number should be much smaller). Also contains pointers to an interesting discussion of lack of opportunities for college grads in China.
3. OpenSSO and the Value of Open Source -- …

I’ve recently been migrating my wiki/documentation for Kontrollbase to Trac. For those that are not aware, Trac is a web-based documentation/wiki/Subversion tool that is used by countless number of software projects. Subversion, of course, is a software collaboration and code management repository that manages branches/tags/trunk files with revision control. It’s one of the most heavily used open-source code repositories available. Given that I use SVN (subversion) for all of my software applications and am now using Trac, the book “Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion” by David J Murphy comes as a useful and great resource for integrating these two useful tools. …

Piper Jaffray has published a 300+ page study on the cloud computing industry based on a recent survey undertaken of 100 CIOs. Bottom line, cloud computing is expected to grow significantly over the next five years. 

    Survey respondents expect the mix of cloud computing to escalate strongly to 13.5% in five years. This equates to a five-year CAGR of 19.2%, or 23.9% when we also incorporate IDC’s forecast that total software budgets will grow 4.7% annually. In other words, software spending will grow gradually in the next five years, but the mix of spend allocated to cloud-based applications will likely surge rapidly. Another way to think about the data is that the Cloud Computing market is expected to grow five times as fast as the broader software market: 23.9% vs. 4.7%.

If anything, I think the prediction is conservative and the impact could be much larger in magnitude when mainstream …

Maureen O’Gara, self-described as “the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years”, has written an article about Drizzle at Rackspace for one of Sys-con’s online zines called Cloud Computing Journal, of which she is an editor.

I tried commenting on Maureen’s article on their website, but the login system is apparently borked, at least for registered users who use OpenID, which it wants to still have a separate user ID and login. Note to sys-con.com: OpenID is designed so that users don’t have to remember yet another login for your website.

Besides having little patience for content-sparse websites that simply provide an online haven for dozens of Flash …

So far PHProjekt 6 (P6, see http://phprojekt.com) is already enhanced with nice AJAX workflows and snappy user-experience. Nevertheless, we discussed a way to provide synchronous communication and direct information within the application.

Everybody knows GoogleMail with its easy to use frontend. Maybe you use it for your daily work. In GoogleMail, there is no need to refresh the page to receive a new mail, Google informs you automatically whenever a new mail is available. But how is this possible? The answer to this question is really simple: The server triggers a signal informing that a new mail is available. This technology is called Comet and describes a way how the server communicates with the client [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) ].

Is there a way to use Comet …

So far PHProjekt 6 (P6, see http://phprojekt.com) is already enhanced with nice AJAX workflows and snappy user-experience. Nevertheless, we discussed a way to provide synchronous communication and direct information within the application.

Everybody knows GoogleMail with its easy to use frontend. Maybe you use it for your daily work. In GoogleMail, there is no need to refresh the page to receive a new mail, Google informs you automatically whenever a new mail is available. But how is this possible? The answer to this question is really simple: The server triggers a signal informing that a new mail is available. This technology is called Comet and describes a way how the server communicates with the client [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) ].

Is there a way to use Comet …

In a time when many tradeshows are experiencing lower then normal attendance the 8th Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 8x) had record attendance this past weekend in Los Angeles. I was there exhibiting and conducting a community training day for Zenoss and was very impressed by not only the quality of the program but the enthusiasm of the attendees.

Here are some of the highlights:

The Mini Conferences

On the Friday before the main SCaLE expo and speaking program starts many people hold …

With the motivation from today’s public news on Twitter’s move from MySQL to Cassandra, my own skills desire following in-depth discussions at last November’s Open SQL Camp to consider Cassandra and yesterday’s discussion with a new client on persistent key-value store products, today I download installed and configured for the first time. Not that today’s news was unexpected, if you follow the Twitter Engineering Open Source projects you would have seen Cassandra as well as other products being used or evaluated by Twitter.

So I went from nothing to a …

How do you build one of the busiest websites on the Internet? You wouldn’t guess the right answer to be, “You download some free software and hack  it”…Actually  the question is how do you build one of the world’s busiest websites that will scale affordably? You use open source software.

Twitter showed everyone their cards recently by publishing all the open source projects that they are contributing to. This is the picture of how open source software should work.

Organization has a a big, hard problem to solve. They write some software or update existing software and …