I wrote a guest column for GigaOm on how open source software, cloud and software as a service are helping to bring about the consumerization of IT: namely bringing simplicity where complexity reigned.  I cited some examples including New Relic, Box.net and Apple.

Open source has gone a long way toward putting power back in the hands of developers, who can download, install and deploy software without having to go through any kind of convoluted sales or budget approval process.  You want MySQL?  You can download and install in 15 minutes, and you don’t have to …

Welcome to Log Buffer. The weekly roundup of posts, and news of what’s happening in the database world.

At Pythian, we’re pretty much recovered from a hectic Oracle OpenWorld 2010, and I’m no longer an OOW virgin. What an experience! I had the pleasure of meeting many of you Log Buffer readers and contributors at the Annual Blogger’s Meetup at Jillian’s. Great to put faces to names. And I now officially feel like “Vanessa from Log Buffer”, as many of your t-shirts will show.

Many thanks to Marc Fielding for providing the hot items for this week’s post, in …

Openworld 2010, despite the supposedly lagging economy, had record attendance again this year.  No doubt this was the result of Oracle acquiring something like fourteen companies since last year, including Sun in 2009.  The crowds were thick, divided about evenly between geeks in badly-fitting vendor t-shirts and slick sales-side hustlers with dress pants and shiny shoes.  I landed somewhere in the middle of the two (badly-fitting dress shirt, comfortable jeans and loafers), proudly sporting a long dangling codpiece of ribbons from my attendee badge:

My OOW2010 Codpiece

Oracle made a number of important announcements this year at OpenWorld, including a the Exalogic machine, and support for Amazon EC2, which I blogged about …

1. jsTerm -- ANSI-capable telnet terminal built in HTML5 with Javascript, Websocket, and Node.js. (via waxpancake on Twitter)
2. MySQL EXPLAINer -- visualize the output of the MySQL EXPLAIN command. (via eonarts on Twitter)
3. Google Code University -- updated with new classes, including C++ and Android app development.
4. Cloudtop Applications (Anil Dash) -- Anil calling "trend" on multiplatform native apps with cloud storage. Another layer in the Web 2.0 story Tim's …

I’m at OSCON this week. Come say hi and talk Drizzle, Rackspace, cloud, photography, vegan food or brewing.

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A longer version of this story is published at www.opensources.com

Last week, Barnes & Noble announced they would cut the price on their wireless Nook eReader, from $259 to $199 ($149 for a new WiFi-only edition.)  Many thought this was a good opportunity for the third place contender to gain market share.  But within a few hours Amazon beat Barnes & Noble's price by $10, marking down the Kindle …

Alfresco launches Activiti project. Funding for NorthScale and Zend. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Alfresco launched the Apache-licensed Activiti BPM project, led by Tom Baeyens and Joram Barrez.

# NorthScale announced $10m in series B funding, led by the Mayfield Fund, and a new CEO.

# Zend Technologies raised $9m led by Greylock Partners with participation its existing investors.

# Stephen Walli joined the CodePlex Foundation as its technical director. …

Financial services on the go - GlassFish for Fundamo and profit
Alexis recently published a new Adoption Story on how Fundamo uses GlassFish v2 and OpenMQ for its Enterprise Platform. Overview at stories entry, details in questionnaire, and an overview in this earlier short video interview.
We are always interested in more GlassFish adoption stories, both from (non-paying) users and from (paying) customers.   …

Oracle managed to score a major victory last week at the MySQL Conference by announcing performance gains of 200-360% in the forthcoming version 5.5.  This is a tremendous improvement and comes in part due to closer collaboration between what were historically two distinct (and occasionally competitive) groups: the InnoBase team and the MySQL Server team.  Bringing the InnoBase team under the direction of the MySQL Server team under Tomas Ullin is a great benefit not only to MySQL developers, but also for MySQL users.  No doubt these performance gains are a result of many months of hard work by not only Tomas, but also a good number of folks on both teams including guys like Mikael Ronstrum, Kojstja, Calvin Sun and others.  

Reaction to the new release has been positive in the community from the likes of …