Sacha asks whether switching support providers is really that difficult, while Bill brings up the question of open standards. READ MORE

I had a sad time this year when I missed the MySQL conference, since I had much fun last year in Santa Clara. I can’t miss it next year.

As a MySQL partner, and after almost 2 years doing MySQL training, I sure have interesting things to tell in the conference, but I’m not sure about what.

I will be thinking about this in the next weeks, but I’d appreciate some help. What topics are you interested in?

Well, I have started formatting the results from the survey. This will take a little while as the survey software doesn't make it easy to download and clean it up (without paying for a subscription). As soon as the data is cleaned up I will post the entire data set and a link for everyone to download.

However, while I work on the data, I will provide some summary results. Here is a list of countries who had respondents. If a country is not listed, it had 0 responses/

Kickfire was recently selected by Network World as one of 10 Open Source Companies to Watch. First of all, the disclaimer: we are not an open source company. As any of you reading this blog know, Kickfire is an appliance company. So, why then did we appear on the list? The link of course is MySQL.

The Kickfire appliance was built to run MySQL for high-performance business intelligence and data warehousing workloads. So, while we are not an open source company, we are very much what I would term as an “open source-based business”. Now, for those who track the data warehousing market, it might seem that a lot of vendors could claim that mantle as a large proportion have code that is derived from PostgreSQL. However, that’s not what I mean by an open source-based business. So, how would one …

How is the newest browser fairing in technical reviews? READ MORE

As open-source vendors grow in strength, the value of source code diminishes as a guard against vendor lock-in. READ MORE

Why I'm switching to Google Chrome; hint: it's for the same reason that I originally went to Firefox READ MORE

Latest Version Leverages Windows Volume Shadow Service (VSS) to Backup Open Files and Open Standard Formats for Data Compression and Encryption.

The Amanda Project, a ZmandaTM sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, announces the availability of Amanda 2.6.0p2. This latest version provides open file backup and recovery for Windows XP, Vista desktops and laptops and Windows 2003, 2008 servers, enabling system administrators to perform backup without impacting users and applications. By leveraging the standard zip format for backup images, Amanda 2.6.0p2 gives users the flexibility to recover their data with or without Amanda software. This version, complete with a Windows Installer and a 15-minute configuration guide, is available for free download. With this Zmanda-led release, Amanda further extends its leadership as the most comprehensive and popular open source network backup and recovery software …

Part 1 covered Network Edition backup features, today’s snips apply to all editions.

First among the lesser known additions: We recently provided the possibility for a nice performance boost to some environments by adding the ability to turn on batched indexing in ZCS 5.0.3 (you can even fine tune it at the localconfig, COS, and account level). We’re not talking about when you re-index an entire account here, this is a change to the index-as-received model; now new items can sit in a ‘queue’ (really a ‘indexing deferred’ flag on the mail_items table of the pertaining mboxgroup database in MySQL) to run all at once when it reaches the zimbraBatchedIndexingSize threshold, saving you from all the tiny disk thrashing. It might not be …

Watch for Zend, MySQL, Asterisk, PHP and Apache conferences coming to a city near you! READ MORE