Greetings from Sankt Augustin, Germany! I've arrived by train today and just returned from the FrOSCon venue, which will start tomorrow. The organizers are still busy with the preparations, but things already seem to be in good shape.

It was a mild and sunny evening today. Hopefully it will be the same tomorrow again, so we can enjoy a relaxed BBQ outside! The social event at FrOSCon is always a nice opportunity to meet and talk with fellow open source enthusiasts, users and developers.

And finally some good news for those of you who can't make it to FrOSCon this year: there will be live video streams from selected lecture rooms! So you will be able to attend the OpenSQL Camp sessions virtually - just head over to http://live.froscon.org/ and select room "HS6". It'll be …

It seems safe to say that Oracle is currently ahead of Microsoft when it comes to the company with the most contentious relationship with open source. To some extent that is due Oracle’s questionable approach to community, but it must also be noted that Microsoft has managed not to put its foot in it for a while.

In Microsoft 2009 published its first companywide perspective on open source, made its first contributions to the Linux kernel, and created the CodePlex Foundation, an independent entity designed to encourage its developers and other companies to contribute more to open source software projects.

Doubts have remained about Microsoft’s ongoing commitment, however, with the company being labeled opportunistic in its approach to open source, and skepticism persists – particularly in relation to software patents. We have recently published a new …

MySQLdb is a Python wrapper around _mysql written by Andy Dustman. This wrapper makes it possible to interact with a MySQL Server performing all sorts of DDL and DML statements. I began my Python journey recently and stumbled at the installation of the MySQLdb module install. I was keen not to jump at an apt/yum installation as we have servers that have no outbound connections I decided I wanted to build the module from source.

You can download the MySQLdb files from SourceForge (70kb)

When downloaded you need to prep before your system is ready to build the file. Here are some prerequisites that will make life easier for you. I performed this particular install using an Ubuntu 10.04 64bit OS.

Before you start ensure you have the following installed (MySQL isn't actually required but for local Python development …

If you need to work with LVM in your scripts but haven’t found a good method to access details about Logical Volume Groups, here’s a simple Python script that will print the details about any volumes on your system. This could be useful for writing a partition check script for your MySQL data directory (if you’re not using a standard monitoring system like Nagios).

import sys
import os
import commands
import subprocess
import select

def lvm():
    print ""
    LVM_PATH = "/sbin"
    LVM_BIN = os.path.join(LVM_PATH, 'lvm')
    argv = list()
    argv.append(LVM_BIN)
    argv.append("lvs")
    argv.append("--nosuffix")
    argv.append("--noheadings")
    argv.append("--units")
    argv.append("b")
    argv.append("--separator")
    argv.append(";")
    argv.append("-o")
    argv.append("lv_name,vg_name,lv_size")

    process = subprocess.Popen(argv, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    output = ""
    out = process.stdout.readline()
    output += out
    lines = …

Here’s a simple answer to a simple question. “How do I run a backup of MySQL to another machine without writing to the local server’s filesystem?” – this is especially useful if you are running out of space on the local server and cannot write a temporary file to the filesystem during backups.

Method one – this writes a remote file.
mysqldump [options] [db_name|--all-databases]| gzip -c | ssh user@host.com "cat > /path/to/new/file.sql.gz"

Method two – this writes directly into a remote mysql server
mysqldump [options] [db_name|--all-databases]| mysql --host=[remote host] –user=root –password=[pass] [db_name]

There are many questions that arise out of Oracle’s copyright and patent infringement complaint against Google regarding its use of Java in Android. There are several things that make the suit significant to the entire industry: it centers not just on software copyright, but also software patents (an increasingly and hotly debated issue), the quickly-expanding smartphone market and open source software. The first question is: what is Oracle doing?

Many are speculating that this is simply an effort to further and more effectively monetize Java, a storied program language that has move more toward openness and survived several supposed death sentences as newer languages arrived. Still, with all of the open source parts — GlassFish application server, MySQL database, OpenOffice.org suite — is Java the most significant to Oracle? It may be, but regardless of what Oracle is doing, its legal moves here may certainly have an impact on the …

As a continuation to a previous blog post last week and inspired by Kedar I have created a small script to export tables, stored procedures, functions and views into their respective file. It works for multiple databases where you can specify a list of databases too and although things like events, triggers and such are still missing they are easily added.

It is especially useful to dump stored procedures separately since it is a lacking functionality in mysqldump.

I placed the script in mysql forge for anybody to use, provide feedback and possibly enhancements to it.

Compliance. Funding. Financial results. Copyright assignment. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Compliance
# The Linux Foundation launched the Open Compliance Program, including tools, training, and consulting.

Funding
# VentureBeat reported that Joyent has raised $7m in a second round of funding.

# Basho Technologies secured $2m from angel investors in a Series C preferred equity financing.

# …

Stephen O’Grady and Simon Phipps have both recently published interesting posts on the current state of open source, with Stephen pondering the relative growth of open source and Simon wondering whether the “commercial open source” bubble has burst.

What they are describing, I believe, is the culmination of the trends we predicted at the beginning of 2009 for commercial open source business strategies – specifically the arrival of the fourth stage of commercial open source.

What is the fourth stage of commercial open source? In short: a return to a focus on collaboration and …

I'm in the process of setting up Redmine (version 1.0-stable) on an Ubuntu 8.04 virtual machine. Getting a recent enough gem and rails is less fun than you might imagine, but the big issue I came across was a bug in the database model, which makes MySQL 5.1 (MariaDB 5.1 in my case) barf on installation.

There is a fix, but I am running from a git clone didn't want to download and apply a diff file to that repository. A quick google found what I need: the git cherry-pick command. It allows you to grab a single commit and apply its changes to your branch. In my case:

git cherry-pick  …