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 …

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 …

Matt Asay and Marten Micknos both tweeted about Oracle's ad targeted at Sun customers that ran in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal. It's also on Oracle's Web site:

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The event is public and free. Therefore, it needs public sponsoring. I don't know yet if I can attend, but I have already donated something to the organizers, and I am officially a sponsor. You can be one too. Simply go to the sponsors page and donate a minimum of $100 as in individual or $250 as an …

While not a MySQL topic, as most of my readers view my MySQL Blog, my WordPress blog has been hacked? Has yours?

Like many, I’m sure you may have read about it like at Wordpress blogs under attack from hack attack but I was surprised when my custom permlinks did not work.

Being surprised I looked at Administrator accounts, and I found that there was one more number then being displayed in the list. I had to dig into the database to find the problem.

mysql> select * from wp_users where ID in (select user_id from wp_usermeta where meta_key = 'wp_capabilities' and meta_value like '%admin%');
+-----+-------------+------------------------------------+---------------+------------------------------+---------------------------+---------------------+---------------------+-------------+--------------+
| ID  | user_login  | user_pass                          | user_nicename | …

It's gotta be tough for InfoWorld's overworked editors to figure out how to recognize the best open source products out there. Open source has become so pervasive in IT that there aren't too many areas where there aren't at least a half-dozen interesting pieces of open source technology from software infrastructure, networking, development tools, desktop software, you name it. I'm not a part of the decision making process in these awards, but I have empathy for them and all the different products they need to consider.

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I just read Björn Schotte's post on the activities of the European Union antitrust regulators concerning the intended takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.

Björn mentions a news article that cites EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes saying that the commission has the obligation to protect the customers from reduced choice, higher costs or both. But to me, this bit is not the most interesting. Later on the article reads:


The Commission said it was concerned that the open source nature of Sun's MySQL database might not …

I have several side projects when time permits and one is that of benchmarking various MySQL technologies (e.g. MySQL 5.0,5.1,5.4), variants (e.g. MariaDB, Drizzle) and storage engines (e.g. Tokutek, Innodb plugin) and even other products like Tokyo Cabinet which is gaining large implementations.

You have two options with benchmarks, the brute force approach such as Sysbench, TPC, sysbench, Juice Benchmark, iibench, mysqlslap, skyload. I prefer the realistic approach however these are always on client’s private data. What is first needed is better access to public data for benchmarks. I have compiled this list to date and I am seeking additional sources for reference.

• Feebase – Data is in clean loadable format
• IMDB – Not clean, but Roland Bouman is working on …