Where are you going to invest your time and money. You may invest in your kids, your work, your hobbies, and more. As you make these decisions, your passion is one consideration, but another is the return on your investment. Of course, you want your investments to be successful. The best way to ensure success is to bet on winners. In other words, you want to invest your time and money on things you are confident will be successful. This holds true in your personal and your professional life.

When Alexandre Dumas (on a side note, my wife refers to me regularly as a Dumas) said that "Nothing succeeds like success" he was encapsulating this same decision process and the conclusion that people want to bet on winners, and that by so doing, they are perpetuating that winning.

So what does this have to do with open source software (OSS)? I received a note from Roland Bouman about a prior post, where he said: "I got seriously involved in …

Where are you going to invest your time and money. You may invest in your kids, your work, your hobbies, and more. As you make these decisions, your passion is one consideration, but another is the return on your investment. Of course, you want your investments to be successful. The best way to ensure success is to bet on winners. In other words, you want to invest your time and money on things you are confident will be successful. This holds true in your personal and your professional life.

When Alexandre Dumas (on a side note, my wife refers to me regularly as a Dumas) said that "Nothing succeeds like success" he was encapsulating this same decision process and the conclusion that people want to bet on winners, and that by so doing, they are perpetuating that winning.

So what does this have to do with open source software (OSS)? I received a note from Roland Bouman about a prior post, where he said: "I got seriously involved in …

Mark Leith, on of the MySQL Support Team managers wrote some time ago a very nice utility I use often called Statpack.

My use of Statpack is very simple. Take two snaphots of SHOW GLOBAL STATUS and compare to produce a text based version of the statistics.

Over time I’ve grown to love it’s simplicity, but notice a number of shortcomings. Being open source there is always the ability to modify, improve and give back. This post is more about detailing those little annoyances that I’d like to improve, or see improved. It is also a means to collate points into one location that I often forget about over time.

I welcome any input, and specifically help in this open source venture.

Here is my wish list that I can currently remember. I do plan to action, time permitting.

1. In Statement Activity, the total percentages are great to …

In a comment to my prior post , Roland Bouman raised the issue mixed messages inherent in the dual-licensing model of open source. There is more context to his comment, but he says: "I am all for commercial open source. I am just curious how you feel you can logically defend both ‘take us we’re open and free’ and ‘take us we offer quality paid for extras’."

There are many articles written on the topic of free open source and hybrid models, so in the words of Inigo Montoya from Princess Bride: "… let me ’splain. No, there’s too much. Let me sum up."

Open Source Software (OSS) is a …

In a comment to my prior post , Roland Bouman raised the issue mixed messages inherent in the dual-licensing model of open source. There is more context to his comment, but he says: "I am all for commercial open source. I am just curious how you feel you can logically defend both ‘take us we’re open and free’ and ‘take us we offer quality paid for extras’."

There are many articles written on the topic of free open source and hybrid models, so in the words of Inigo Montoya from Princess Bride: "… let me ’splain. No, there’s too much. Let me sum up."

Open Source Software (OSS) is a …

OK, you’ve released your open source product and built a huge userbase. Now your shareholders/investors are pressing you to monetize that userbase. How do you do it? There are many ways to monetize open source. For simplicity, let’s segment the revenue sources according to who is paying:

Users :
Your users probably downloaded your product for free. Some are willing to pay for certified/approved distributions, maintenance, updates, support and more. Because open source turns your product and services into commodities, you will need to leverage your brand, and the expertise that it embodies, to maintain premium pricing.

Another good revenue source is certified education. If you’ve built a large userbase, businesses clearly see value in your product. As a result, employees and job-seekers will enhance their personal value and marketability if they are certified experts with your product. Assemble copyrighted educational …

OK, you’ve released your open source product and built a huge userbase. Now your shareholders/investors are pressing you to monetize that userbase. How do you do it? There are many ways to monetize open source. For simplicity, let’s segment the revenue sources according to who is paying:

Users :
Your users probably downloaded your product for free. Some are willing to pay for certified/approved distributions, maintenance, updates, support and more. Because open source turns your product and services into commodities, you will need to leverage your brand, and the expertise that it embodies, to maintain premium pricing.

Another good revenue source is certified education. If you’ve built a large userbase, businesses clearly see value in your product. As a result, employees and job-seekers will enhance their personal value and marketability if they are certified experts with your product. Assemble copyrighted educational …

Baron got a great amount of response from his 50 things to know before migrating Oracle to MySQL. I’m glad I invited him as a fellow MySQL colleague to my presentation to the Federal Government on Best Practices for Migrating to MySQL from Oracle and SQL Server for his inspiration.

Oracle will always be a more featured product then MySQL. There are however features that MySQL has that Oracle does not. While I’ve got a draft of a list of my own, I have several hundred incomplete drafts.

One of these features I was able to demonstrate to a client is the ability to have multiple VALUES clauses for a single INSERT statement. For example.

INSERT INTO t1(c1) VALUES (1), (2), (3), (4), (5);

…

Recently I came across another configuration option I’d not heard of before. I profess to not know them all, however I do know when I find something unusual. If you are a beginner DBA, learn what is normal and expected, and identify what is out of the normal, investigate, research and question if necessary.

I gave away a MySQL Administrator’s Book based on seeing a configuration with safe-show-database, an option I’d not seen before, and then requesting people giving basic configuration options in that situation.

The latest is max_tmp_tables. So, what does the manual say for this option. I quote:

The maximum number of temporary tables a client can keep open at the same …

I have been working recently with Matt Yonkovit to get Waffle Grid cloud enabled with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

An initial version of Waffle Grid Cream - Version 0.5 release is now available.

We have elected to create one AMI for now, that is ready to be configured as either a MySQL Server, a memcached server, or as in the following example both. For this first version, we have also not configured MySQL or memcache, but rather provide a virgin Waffle Grid ready server for developers to experiment and benchmark with.

Future releases will include custom AMI’s and the automated ability to register new memcached servers with the Waffle Grid enabled MySQL server.

Instance Creation

We assume you have created an …