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

Jim Starkey, Senior Software Architect at MySQL, is featured in an online interview over at Dr Dobb's Journal. It's a short interview, but every question reveals insight into the Jim's thoughts on the relational model, SQL, security, standards and more. For those who don't know Jim, he is one of the pionneers of the database industry and has implemented several relational databases in his career. Jim has always been an innovator, inventing the widely accepted notion of Blobs (binary large objects) and multi-generational versioning, a key innovation of InterBase. Jim and Ann Harrison joined MySQL from Netfrastructure, the company they... READ MORE

Jim Starkey, Senior Software Architect at MySQL, is featured in an online interview over at Dr Dobb's Journal. It's a short interview, but every question reveals insight into the Jim's thoughts on the relational model, SQL, security, standards and more. For those who don't know Jim, he is one of the pionneers of the database industry and has implemented several relational databases in his career. Jim has always been an innovator, inventing the widely accepted notion of Blobs (binary large objects) and multi-generational versioning, a key innovation of InterBase. Jim and Ann Harrison joined MySQL from Netfrastructure, the company they... READ MORE

Jim Starkey, Senior Software Architect at MySQL, is featured in an online interview over at Dr Dobb's Journal. It's a short interview, but every question reveals insight into the Jim's thoughts on the relational model, SQL, security, standards and more. For those who don't know Jim, he is one of the pionneers of the database industry and has implemented several relational databases in his career. Jim has always been an innovator, inventing the widely accepted notion of Blobs (binary large objects) and multi-generational versioning, a key innovation of InterBase. Jim and Ann Harrison joined MySQL from Netfrastructure, the company they... READ MORE

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People sometimes ask me if I still do a lot of development.

Well, Ohloh keeps track of that these days and it seems that between September and November 2007 I was the 7th most active contributor:

Ohloh tracks 90655 developers in 8985 projects including Firefox, Apache HTTP server, Subversion, MySQL, PHP, Open Office, the Linux kernel, Ubuntu and many more.  As such, I’m kinda proud of that 7th spot.

If version 3 of Pentaho Data Integration has any bugs left when it launches, it won’t be because I was having a vacation

Until next time,

Matt

We're heading into the home stretch for the Call for Papers for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008. The official deadline is end of day today, October 30 and so far, we have plenty of great submissions. However, there's still an opportunity to get in your presentation. In particular, we're looking for more technical presentations on topics like Scale-out, use of Ruby on Rails, use of .Net, High Availability and case studies that show how you're using MySQL in production applications. It's possible that the call for papers may be extended by a couple of days, but I recommend submitting... READ MORE

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