We presented a webinar along with MySQL last week. The topic was MySQL Backup from the perspective of an Oracle DBA. We got some really good questions at the end of the webinar. Here is a transcript of Q&A:

Q from Trey: Will this Webinar be available online for viewing later?

A from MySQL: Yes. It will be on our site in a few days at http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/

Q from Randy: Is a copy of presentation available on web? Where?

A from Zmanda : slides are available on Zmanda Network: http://network.zmanda.com/

Q from Jing: Converting database from oracle to MySQL, any limitation regards the version compatibility?

A from MySQL: We provide a free GUI migration tool that helps migrate Oracle data objects to MySQL. For a complete and very detailed …

The potential for successfully building or extending a corporate identity based on Open Source depends on a company’s relationship towards an Open Source product. The graph below relates the extend of product ownership to the level of awareness potentially available for marketing:

Basically, the more you own the product, i.e. the more it is directly correlated to your company, the more you can make out of it.

If you’re the creator of the product (e.g. MySQL, the company, is the creator of MySQL, the database), you can utilize maximum awareness in your market. Your whole ecosystem will support your marketing efforts. For example, those providing extensions to your product, will automatically market your product while promoting their extension.

If you’re an external contributor to a product (e.g. providing patches with bug fixes), you …

If you are migrating your production environment to MySQL database or even thinking about it, you do not want to miss this webinar Experts from Zmanda and MySQL will present various methods to backup MySQL database and correlate them with tools and terminology you may be familiar with in other databases, including Oracle.

A good pre-read for this webinar would be Paddy’s blog on online MySQL Backup

WHO:

Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda

Robin Schumacher, Director Product Management, MySQL

WHAT:

MySQL Backup Techniques for the Oracle DBA (web presentation)

WHEN:

Thursday, December 13, 2007, 10:00 am PDT, 1:00 pm EDT, 18:00 GMT
The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long followed by Q&A.

When I first arrived at MySQL more than 4 years ago, we didn't have much in the way of internal Quality Assurance. There were a couple of test suites that had been created and many engineers wrote unit tests. We supported a wide range of platforms, but formal testing was pretty spotty. As bugs were identified and fixed, the test suites were extended to help identify regressions. It was by no means a bullet-proof process; mostly the team depended on external testers to report issues. Sometimes a build would be created that would have some embarassing bug and we'd scramble... READ MORE

A

Marten Mickos emailed to point out the MySQL Workbench offering (a good FAQ here). As I've said before, MySQL gets it. Why? Well, in the eyes of commercial enterprise software vendors, the optimal result is for OSS vendors to stick to their "OSS religious" roots. An incredibly low % of OSS users end up paying for the software/subscription. This means that OSS Vendor A doesn't have the financial resources to close the feature/function gap vs. Enterprise Vendor B. That?s why growing an OSS business beyond $100M is more difficult than getting to $100M. Yes, OSS is already competing with enterprise... READ MORE

If you do serious web development, you sure have multiple working environments. This is true for ruby on rails, but I’ll guess you’ll do the same using other frameworks or languages. I’ve found a quite useful Firefox extension to switch from development to production (and back) with just a click (or a keystroke: Ctrl-Shift-X): Server Switcher

This is helping me redesigning the MySQL training part of our website, and can be useful in some other situations.

The market for server virtualization software appears to have gotten a whole lot more crowded this week. Not only did Oracle announce free server virtualization software at the Oracle Open World conference, but Microsoft and VMWare also made announcements of competing free offerings. And this morning at Oracle OpenWorld Sun announced their plans for virtualization also, known as xVM with support from Intel, AMD, Symantec and MySQL among others. Rich Green, head of Software at Sun, demonstrated Sun's xVM virtualization server and the xVM Ops Center management software console with a live demo deploying a workload to some Sun servers... READ MORE

I just read Colin Baker's article about a European OSS support provider named Credativ. The Credativ website claims: "credativ support covers a large number of open source projects, including: Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Red Hat, Xandros, Mandriva, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Kolab -Groupware, eGroupware, Asterisk, Apache, Squid, Postfix, Exim, sendmail, Cyrus, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Samba, OpenLDAP, Nagios, DRBD, Keepalived, Amanda, XEN, Gnome and KDE, OpenOffice.org, Firefox and many more." They seem to have a very similar business model to OpenLogic. Apparently the news is that Credativ has been successful in Germany for the past two years and is now expanding to the UK. It... READ MORE

We've kicked off our annual survey of MySQL users recently on the developer zone of the MySQL site. There are some new questions and some old questions so that we can gauge trends over time. For example in last year's survey we saw that: -40% of MySQL users also use Oracle -50% of MySQL users are using MySQL Replication -Over 50% of MySQL users have been using MySQL longer than 4 years -Over 50% of MySQL users plan to increase their usage in the next year We get lots of feedback from our users and customers and the survey is... READ MORE