In just over 2 weeks I’ll be the invited speaker in Washington DC to Best practices for migrating applications to MySQL. This workshop is being held in conjunction with Carahsoft and Sun/MySQL and aims to provide to the Federal sector valuable information for the continued usage and uptake of Open Source and specifically MySQL.

As part of my preparation I’m happy to hear from any organizations that have successfully migrated from Oracle/SQL Server/Informix/Sybase etc to MySQL and would like to be cited.

While I have been involved in the process I am also happy to hear of reasons why a migration failed, was aborted or postponed. This is all valuable information in determining what are the most ideal applications.

There are plenty of new databases coming out, aiming to tackle the massively scalable domain that Google's BigTable pioneered. On the Radar mailing list, Jesse pointed out Cassandra (Facebook's offering) and Mike Loukides countered with Hypertable, asking "We're sort of being overrun with BigTable-style databases; I wonder what's going to win?". (Artur observed, "Cassandra is less like BigTable and more like a distributed column store with autocreating and searching in column namespace, but lacks a lot of indexing needed for BigTable.")

Jesse replied it'd be the one that's easiest for developers to use quickly, and I expanded that to:

• language and platform integration (e.g., Ruby, Rails, Django) so it can be used in the language you use to get stuff done
• higher abstractions available …

Java and MySQL are bright spots in the quarter, while Solaris and virtualization sputter. READ MORE

This is Zak Greant's weekly report on his activities for the Mozilla Foundation from January 19th to 25th, 2009.

Wading through heaps of Mozilla email and feeds last week paid off this week. Instead of worrying about what I hadn't read or wondering where I was duplicating other's work, I was able to focus on program development with most of my effort going into developing the Mozilla Social Movement Program Concept, working on the Mozilla Manifesto Stories experiment and catching up with my peers. At 54 hours, the week was a bit long but I was glad to be able to focus. …

Learn how to extend your existing MySQL based website to leverage the power of MySQL variants, AWS cloud based MySQL deployments and RDBMS alternatives. Evaluate how to integrate and use these different various technologies such as MySQL based variations KickFire, a column based optimization and InfoBright, a data warehousing solution. Understand the means of approach towards data synchronization between various database solutions in your business.

At the MySQL Meetup in New York this month, I spoke on “Extending the MySQL Data Landscape“. A MySQL centric view on an earlier work, “The Data Landscape” which I presented at a recent GoDaddy Tech Day.

You can download the presentation on my Presentations page.

Good news!

DBD::mysql

I have a new co-maintainer who is going to help out with DBD::mysql, particularly with Windows build issues with Strawberry Perl. His name is Matthew Wilson. He "works part-time for a hedge fund maintaining predictive market models. " and I'm looking forward to working with him to improve DBD::mysql.

Things on the agenda for DBD::mysql :

* Build issues, particularly with Windows
* Any bugs that need fixing
* Change to a new SVN server, as well as get moved to Launchpad

Memcached Functions for MySQL

New release this week, 0.8. Numerous fixes, particularly to behaviors functions. They will work now!

Thats all for now. I'm in the middle of writting a book, so must get back to work!

If you read this blog, you should probably sign the petition !

Seems like more secrets are being let out of the bag. MySQL Enterprise provides support for Memcached - a distributed memory-based caching system, and I've been asked to present a webinar discussing how we've used memcached in the MySQL.com architecture.

Once again it may come as a surprise that the MySQL.com websites have been using memcached well before MySQL started providing support. We were starting to have growing pains, with now 20 million page impressions and 3 million visitors per month, and needed to figure out how to effectively scale without throwing heaps of hardware at the problem. Memcached was a perfect solution and gives us a toolkit that is easily integrated into our …

Gerv, Frank, Mark and I have been discussing ideas around how people can turn open source experience into an asset for their resume. We’ve got some of our own ideas, but we want yours as well. Please blog, comment, email or ‘dent any one of us, or catch up with Gerv and Mark at FOSDEM.

My top three tips for making the best of your open source participation are:

1. Free your work and free yourself. Turn software into a platform for your career by contributing to free and open projects and by releasing your own work under free software and open source licenses. In addition to the well-understood collaborative benefits, you get to keep using …

In case you haven't noticed them yet ..
MySQL Proxy has a new release and moved it's public repo to Launchpad.

(Still Launchpad isn't open source yet .. a matter of time .. but in the meanwhile Jira and Confluence are sadly gaining adoption in the market)

In the devministration area there is a new Puppet module that automagically populates puppet managed machines in Zenoss , I've seen different people using Puppet to populate their Nagios configs, but adding Zenoss to the list is new.. so when will we see the Zabbix and Hyperic plugins ?

Oh yes.. and then there is Chef