It has been more than a year since my self-imposed hiatus from serious MySQL development started and I think it is about time that I get back into the saddle. I have a handful of working prototypes but I should get the code out there, back into the community.I learned a bunch of stuff during the past year at Google but in the end, working on JavaScript, HTML/CSS and Google proprietary languages

A couple of days ago, Baron Schwartz posted some simple load and select benchmarking of MyISAM, Infobright and MonetDB, which Vadim Tkachenko followed up with a more realistic dataset and interesting figures where MonetDB beat Infobright in most queries.

Used to the parallel IEE loader, I was surprised by the apparent slow loading speed of Baron's benchmark and decided to try and replicate it. I installed Infobright 3.2 on my laptop (see, this is very unscientific) and wrote a simple perl script to generate and load an arbitrarily large data set resembling Baron's description. I'm not going to post my exact numbers, because this installation is severely …

With thousands of votes from the Zimbra community submitted to our product management database, and tens of thousands of hours logged by our engineering team, we are excited to officially announce Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0.

ZCS 6.0 is chock full of everything you asked for – because we made sure to check off the hit list of top requests. Some of the highlights include improved delegation and share management, increased productivity with three-pane email view, read receipts, remote wipe for mobile devices, and more. Our goal was also to make ZCS 6.0 the most flexible product yet, so we’ve also made it easier than ever to integrate 3rd party software. You can learn more about the new features in 6.0 later …

1. Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography -- This resource provides a comprehensive view of the history of cartography, with examples of maps created throughout the ages and background information about the contexts within which those maps, visualizations and map making technologies were created. Explore each time period, click on the images and stories found throughout each time line, and read more about the history of creating thematic maps as a means of visualizing data. (via Titine on Delicious)
2. Interview with Larry Ellison (Infoworld) -- Asked about MySQL, "No, we're not going to spin it off," even if asked to by the EU, Ellison said. Lots of detail and …

There is once again a lot of fuzz going on about Open Source Business models,

First on my eyballs was the article that Customers don't seem to like openCore what a big surprise ..

So that's not the one that makes the customers happy ,

Then there is the other side of the coin, the people that create open source
Authors realize the dual licensing model comes hunting back at you after a merger or a hostile acquisition, yes they still have the source code to build on but they can't sell commercial licenses to their customers anymore they way they used to. …

I've been meaning to post some real-world data on the performance of the Infobright 3.2 release which happened a few weeks ago after an extended release candidate period. We're just preparing our upgrades now, so I don't have any performance notes over significant data sets or complicated queries to post quite yet.

To make up for that, I decided to address a particular annoyance of mine in the community edition, first because it hadn't been addressed in the 3.2 release (and really, I'm hoping doing this would include it into 3.2.1), and second, simply because the engine being open source means I can. I feel being OSS is one of Infobright's biggest strengths, in addition to being a pretty amazing piece of performance for such a simple, undemanding package in general, and not making use of that would be shame. Read on …

Clayton Christensen has some excellent insights on Modularity vs Integration in “The Innovator’s Solution”. I wrote about this for Upstarta.biz. Particularly in the realm of Open Source, modularity is regarded as a panacea – a product, service or design must be modular. But  modularity is not better (or worse) than integration. Like tools, they each have their place, depending on the state of the market/ecosystem where the process/product/service operates. Part of a system can be in a modular phase, where another part of the same system needs integration!

In this context, think of an Open Source project or company’s ability to handle contributions. If the process of interaction between a contributor and the core is not (for whatever reason) clearly defined and predictable, it won’t work. Jamming an additional [in this case …

It is important that you monitor the MySQL error log. There are a few different options available for defining the details of the log. If not specified the default is [datadir]/[hostname].err. This is not an ideal location for 2 reasons.

First, a correctly configured MySQL datadir will have permissions only for the mysql user, and this is generally restrictive access to the user only and no group or world permissions. Other users/groups should have limited access to the mysql error log.

Second, the datadir is for data, not logs, especially logs that can potentially fill file systems. I am referring here to more then just the error log.

I would recommend you create a separate directory for MySQL logs such as the error, slow and general logs. An example I implement for single installation environments using Linux mysql packages is:

mkdir /var/log/mysql
chown mysql:mysql /var/log/mysql
chmod 750 /var/log/mysql

Been a while since we did a post for open positions but this is an important one so wanted to get it out there.

Position Overview:
Manage Zimbra’s rapidly growing technical community and launch our developer outreach program.  A key part of Zimbra’s rapid growth and ongoing success is the ability for us to engage and interact with our open source community.  This position will take the solid base we’ve grown over the past 5 yrs and define and implement a Zimbra developer program to lower the bar for external developers, partners and customers to build solutions around the Zimbra platform.  This will include expanding and leveraging the relationships between Zimbra, our customers, our developers and our sysadmin community members.  A few of the existing public tools and touch points are listed below. This position will build upon and improve the current tools and evaluate and add to these as needed.  The …

In my recent post on the EU antitrust regulators' probe into the Oracle Sun merger I did not mention an important class of stakeholders: the MySQL-based special purpose database startups. By these I mean:

• 
  
• Kickfire
  
• Infobright
  
• Calpont
  
• ScaleDB
  

I think it's safe to say the first three are comparable in the sense that they are all analytical databases: they are designed for data warehousing and business intelligence applications. ScaleDB might be a good fit for those …