MySQL being acquired by Sun has of course put a lot of focus on the success of MySQL so far, but it is also interesting to think what success will mean as part of Sun too. In this light a recent interview of MÃ¥rten by Business Review Online about the acquisition was inspiring. (As words from MÃ¥rten usually are!)

"It's a marathon, not a sprint," he said. "If a 15-year-old downloads MySQL now, when do we get our money? In about 15 years' time when he is head of IT at a company and he loves MySQL. But in many cases it will happen sooner than that."

"In open source we say fail fast, scale fast. Many web 2.0 ideas will fail, but when Google or Facebook [two of MySQL's biggest customers] get it right they suddenly need to scale like crazy," Mickos said. "Open source is the only model where they can scale fast on exactly the …

Recently I have been asked by my company to make a case for open-source ETL-data integration tools as an alternative for the commercial data integration tool, Informatica PowerCenter.
So I did a lot of research and I'm going to try my best, considering I have never used the open-source tools nor the commercial one.

I found plenty of information about comparisons between Pentaho Kettle and Talend, which were 2 of the open-source tools I was supposed to research.
Now, without getting in a big arguement (or matt casters posting on my blog), I'd like to attempt to compare the two, very briefly.
And again, this is ONLY from the research I did online and not based on my experience using the tools (since I dont really have any).


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For many developers, MySQL and PHP go together like peanut butter and jam. MySQL has a long history of working with the PHP community and that's a commitment that will continue forever. If you've thought scripting languages weren't powerful enough for "real programming" take a look at recent facilities like PDO and the Zend Framework. MySQL has also developed a native PHP driver that has become very popular. This past week to celebrate our commitment to PHP, Sun and MySQL held a meetup / cocktail reception and job fair at PHP Quebec, one of the biggest PHP conferences. Jay Pipes,... READ MORE

Zmanda has introduced a new version of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) which adds quite a few capabilities for MySQL users. Version 2.1 includes enhanced snapshot support that enables backup without application downtime or interruption to online data access. Version 2.1 also has global management of backups so that you can manage all your MySQL backup jobs from a single graphical console. You can now run the entire ZRM solution on Solaris as well as on Linux.

Join us for an overview and a live demo of ZRM 2.1 on Thursday 3/20 at 10am PST. Click here to register.

As Matt reported last week, IBM announced that it was bowing out of the solidDB for MySQL project. "Those of you who know Solid's history know that Solid has long been a leader in the area of in-memory database software. This in-memory technology, and not Solid's open source offering, was the key driver behind IBM's acquisition. As a result, I regret to inform you that, effective immediately, we will not be continuing further development on solidDB for MySQL. solidDB for MySQL will continue to be hosted and available here at SourceForge, and existing releases will continue to be available under... READ MORE

The SnapLogic.org site runs on open source software, including a lot of Python. The bottom of the stack is RedHat Linux, the web server is Apache, the database engine is MySQL, and the main applications are Mailman, Subversion, Trac, Wordpress, and a custom Django application.

All of these pieces play together pretty well, and over the past year we’ve only had a few minor problems to fix. But over the past couple of weeks, we’ve really been hitting Trac hard as we work through our upcoming release, and Trac performance was bad. Really Bad. Like, ‘30 seconds to open a ticket‘ bad.

It’s hard to say if this was a sudden performance drop because we crossed some magic threshold in database size, or if it was slowing getting worse and we really noticed it when we shifted from design to coding. In any case, there are only 1000 tickets in the system so we knew something was wrong.

We turned on the …

Open Source means that the source code is open. There are many inferences that can be made from this, and many stereotypes that can be applied, but in the end, all it means is that you can read the source code as well as use the binaries. I am not a developer. I fully [...]

Zmanda has introduced a new version of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) 2.1 which adds quite a few new capabilities for MySQL users. This version now includes enhanced snapshot support working with Linux LVM, Windows VSS, Solaris ZFS, NeApp SnapManager and Veritas VxFS. When they first told me about the performance on these systems I was blown away. I thought there must be some kind of a trick going on. The trick is to take advantage of the operating system's underlying snapshot capabilities to minimize locking on the database, typically less than one second. Robin, head of our product management group,... READ MORE

We've now officially closed MySQL's acquisition by Sun this morning and I thought I'd make a few observations about the process. I've been through several acquisitions over the years, both on the acquiring and the acquired side, and so far, this one has gone the smoothest. While Sun is obviously a much larger company than MySQL, the approach that the Sun execs and managers have taken has been professional and respectful every step of the way. Not once have I heard Sun employees say "This is the way we do things here." Instead, there has been a strong desire to... READ MORE

While posting about my talk on MySQL Cluster and Drupal I realized something very important about Open Source and how it differs from proprietary software.

Looking at a traditional software and infrastructure consultancy shop you will see that they carry a broad range of products which they care about and which they are actively offerering to customers. For this products they have formal arrangements with suppliers that will both give them licenses, support but also incentives to sell those licenses.

So when a sales guy or a consultant arrives at a customer they are already biased to plug a certain product, and they will try to convince the customer that the product they are selling is the right fit. Even tough when it's a total Misfit.

With the Open Source consultant he won't be plugging a product, he will be listening to his customer and will use the …