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 …

In a prior blog post , I explained how the "open source + paid support " business model only works for software products that address extremely large markets. However, even those large market products rely upon a rich collection of niche market products that combine to deliver solutions.

As the book Crossing the Chasm explains, every technology product must make the move from its early adopter or hobbyist roots to a mainstream application. The hobbyists are willing to accept tinkering with the product to make it work, but the much larger mainstream market wants to buy proven solutions .

As John Donne once said, "no man is an island." Similarly, no software application is an island; each one relies on an orchestra of tools, applications and services necessary to …

In a prior blog post , I explained how the "open source + paid support " business model only works for software products that address extremely large markets. However, even those large market products rely upon a rich collection of niche market products that combine to deliver solutions.

As the book Crossing the Chasm explains, every technology product must make the move from its early adopter or hobbyist roots to a mainstream application. The hobbyists are willing to accept tinkering with the product to make it work, but the much larger mainstream market wants to buy proven solutions .

As John Donne once said, "no man is an island." Similarly, no software application is an island; each one relies on an orchestra of tools, applications and services necessary to …

I discovered while compiling Wafflegrid today that by default, the Ubuntu binaries for memcached are not-multithreaded.

Following the installation of memcached from apt-get and libmemcached I ran memslap for:

$ memslap -s localhost
    Threads connecting to servers 1
    Took 1.633 seconds to load data

$ memstat -s localhost
Listing 1 Server

Server: localhost (11211)
     pid: 23868
     uptime: 54
     time: 1244575816
     version: 1.2.2
     pointer_size: 32
     rusage_user: 0.90000
     rusage_system: 0.120000
     curr_items: 10000
     total_items: 10000
     bytes: 5430000
     curr_connections: 1
     total_connections: 3
     connection_structures: 2
     cmd_get: 0
     cmd_set: 10000
     get_hits: 0
     get_misses: 0 …