I wrote last week about the commercial open source business strategies that I expect to dominate in 2009.

The flipside to that is the commercial open source community strategy. You simply can’t have one without the other, and I expect community strategies will be a hot topic in 2009 and beyond.

Savio Rodrigues wrote recently that “By the end of 2008, virtually every successful open source vendor has a fairly tightly controlled development process and this hasn’t hurt their revenue growth.”

Based on my prediction that proprietary licensing strategies will be increasingly important in the next two years I am inclined to agree with him.

However, I am also …

Percona has been building and contributing to open-source software since the company was founded, and individually we've been doing the same thing for many years.  We think it's a huge value for our customers and the community.

We're involved in a dozen or so open-source projects, but our three core efforts at the moment are the following:

• Percona patches, which are included in our own MySQL builds and then in OurDelta builds and perhaps others as well
• XtraDB, which is our new high-performance transactional storage engine
• Maatkit, which is a toolkit that provides advanced functionality for MySQL.

We have a team of dedicated MySQL developers working on the server …

A (slightly belated) Happy New Year to you! I just returned from my Christmas vacation two days ago, which I spent mostly at home and with my parents-in-law in St. Radegund, Austria. Now I am busy catching up with what has piled up during my absence (I managed to resist the temptation to check my work email during the time off).

Some MySQL-related news that came up in the past weeks and are worth sharing:

• My talk about MySQL HA solutions has been accepted in the main FOSDEM conference track
• The FOSDEM organizers also accepted my lightning talk proposal about Bazaar - it will take place on Saturday, 14h20 (tentative)
• MySQL will have a …

A (slightly belated) Happy New Year to you! I just returned from my Christmas vacation two days ago, which I spent mostly at home and with my parents-in-law in St. Radegund, Austria. Now I am busy catching up with what has piled up during my absence (I managed to resist the temptation to check my work email during the time off).

Some MySQL-related news that came up in the past weeks and are worth sharing:

• My talk about MySQL HA solutions has been accepted in the main FOSDEM conference track
• The FOSDEM organizers also accepted my lightning talk proposal about Bazaar - it will take place on Saturday, 14h20 (tentative)
• MySQL will have a …

Markus Rex returns to Novell’s Linux business unit. Red Hat’s second largest shareholder cuts its stake. The CEOs of Novell, Sonatype, Digium and Kaltura go on the record. Shaun Connolly joins SpringSource. And more.

Official announcements
Novell Announces Executive Appointments to Focus on Cross-Platform Solution Strategy and Growing Linux Business Novell

Palamida Finds Security Tops List of Concerns Inhibiting Broader Open Source Adoption Palamida

GigaSpaces Announces Extreme Scalability for MySQL Enterprise Customers GigaSpaces

…

OK, I cheated and read my 'work' email! Today my talk proposal got accepted and I'm off to the MySQL Conference & Expo, held in Santa Clara (CA, USA), end April 2009. My talk will be about the MySQL Support Team: how it started, the transformation it went through and how it scales today (and much more!).

This is my first talk overseas! I'm quite excited!

What does a MySQL Support Engineer do during his first hours of vacation? Yes, napping. After that, he goes on the web and tries out something new. Today: SugarCRM .. and struggeling a little with the installation.

The problem? The installation (on MacOS 10.5) was successful, no errors, but:
Sugar CRM 5.1.0c Files May Only Be Used With A Sugar CRM 5.1.0 Database

Logging didn't reveal anything, but the general query log did! All DML statements were send to MySQL, but apparently not .. committed? After looking in the code I noticed a lack of commit statements.. Putting an explicit commit it worked, for the `config` table.

What was the real problem?

[mysqld]
init_connect='SET AUTOCOMMIT=0'

Don't ask me why that was there, sometimes I do crazy stuff testing things, but this setup should …

There is a new blog in the MySQL Community arena.

It is a collaborative podium for guest posts. We will host colleagues or community members who have no blog and need a temporary place for their message. The first experiment was successful, and we decided to have a more stable place for it.

We start today by hosting Trim Perhad, System QA manager of MySQL, who presents some interesting performance results.

I had a call with Monty the other day and I told him why I think MySQL Server Quality will never be the same again. I've been thinking a bit more about it and here is the extended list.

In particular I think MySQL Server will never be able to reach its original quality guidelines (see previous post) and even current release criterias will unlikely be ever reached with any sensible definition of what serious bugs are.

Large Team, Tricky Code During MySQL 3.23 and MySQL 4.0 team the small tight knit team was working on the server and Monty was personally reviewing all the code and knew all the code well to know all the side effects etc. Now MySQL Development is done by different team working on the …