This week is the annual MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara and I'm happy to report that we have hit record numbers with more exhibitors (over 50) and more attendees (over 2,000) than ever before. Monday was primarily tutorials as well as our Customer Advisory Board and partner meetings. Those are great sessions as we get tons of input from bleeding edge customers including some of the world's largest web sites, retailers, telecommunications customers and software ISVs and OEMs who embed MySQL. It's a "no BS zone" in that we have product management and lots of developers there to... READ MORE

No, this is not a blog about Computational Fluid Dynamics - my least favorite subject in college. This is about a more exciting (sorry mechanical engineers!) CFD: Customer Facing Data. This is the data that is typically available on the website of an organization that their customers interact with. CFD can range all the way from profiles of users on a social networking site such as Facebook to the customer information database of an e-commerce company such as Travelocity.

CFD represents today’s data protection challenge. Probably the biggest challenge while planning a backup solution for CFD is that it is very hard to figure out what to plan for. You might be starting with a very small database which might grow much more rapidly than what you think. If the data can be segmented based on users or some other characteristic, then you will find that your databases may scale-out instead of scale-up. Also, rate of change can …

Last year open source analyst Michael Coté of Redmonk coined the term Little Four to describe four up-and-coming open source management vendors and as a foil to the Big Four of systems management.

In the open source space, the 4 names that come up each time ? usually from people I?m talking with even before I say anything ? are: Zenoss, Hyperic, GroundWorks, and openQRM.

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I'm hosting a MySQL Tour event in Helsinki, probably this is the last stop on the tour so it will end in the same city where MySQL got started. If you are nearby, please pop in!

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MySQL Tour visits Open Tuesday in Helsinki May 6th

This winter we haven't had as many Open Tuesday meetings as we had last year,
but we will finish off the season with meeting Sun and MySQL on May 6th at
18:00, in the usual place Club Ahjo, Bulevardi 4, Helsinki.

read more

After our late night April Fool's dolphin stunt last week, I got roped into doing an early morning video shoot to preview some of the upcoming items for next week's MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara. I did this on about 4 hours sleep and so I look a bit like Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica, but hopefully less conflicted and not as sleezy. Through the miracle of video editing they made me look semi-coherent, though some things about new storage engines and row-based replication ended up on the cutting room floor. There's a ton of new stuff coming... READ MORE

Worried about Backup and Recovery of your MySQL Databases? MySQL Backup school from Zmanda provides hands on and in depth training on Backup and Recovery of MySQL. Just sign up and show up with your laptop. More information available here.

This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

What is apparent Red Hat’s no longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to …

The MySQL Workbench team has released the latest Release Candidate 5.0.15 of their new DBMS modeling tool. This includes quite a few recent bug fixes and it's now rapidly approaching the GA status. The team continues on to fix all the minor nits out there so keep your feedback coming. Heck, they'll probably have a new version by the time I post this. If you've never used a database modeling tool or have been put off by the cost or complexity of these tools in the past, you should try MySQL Workbench. Mike Zinner and his team have focused on... READ MORE

EnterpriseDB just raised $10M in Series C financing. IBM joined the list of investors including Fidelity Ventures, Valhalla Partners and Charles River Ventures. To date, EnterpriseDB has raised $37.5M (compared to the $39M that MySQL had raised in total after Series C). EnterpriseDB uses the slogan "The Oracle-compatible database company". While I wish Andy and the folks at EnterpriseDB the best, the challenge is that Oracle's high end products aren't in danger of losing to OSS competition. Next, in the majority of Oracle deals, Oracle isn't selling a database anymore. They are selling a database, an application server, tools and... READ MORE

If you are part of a big company and would like to recommend to them a list of open-source and cheap commercial alternatives, I have compiled a list that I use for my company.

These options might make your company more competitive in certain markets and might let you react faster to changes.


Here is the list:

Database - DataWarehouse
InfoBright - Commercial DataWarehouse Engine (highly recommended) that runs inside MySQL. review about it

EnterpriseDB - Commercial Enterprise Scale Database that runs inside PostgreSQL

Vertica - A very high-scale, …