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There will be two MySQL representatives on the fifth jubilee edition of OpenFest in Sofia. Yes, there will be MySQL representatives for fifth time in a row

The lecture, which will be most interesting for me is the one about MySQL proxy. Andrey gave us a general vision on the subject a few months ago during the WebTech, and now I hope that Giuseppe Maxia will tell us some more details about it and that he will be ready to answer many questions; we are planning to give him some “hard time” since he is coming here.

The other lecturer will be Domas Mituzas. He is also a MySQL representative, but he will tell more about the creation of Wikipedia, because …

Ok, I'm a little travelled out with recent trips to around the US visiting customers, the Gartner conference and a trip to Europe for our developer meeting in Germany. So I'm glad that the upcoming Zend PHP conference (Oct 8-11) is in the bay area. I've been to this conference the last few years and it's a good one. Not as large as the MySQL conference, but if you're into PHP, it's got all the technical meat you could want, and then some. I expect the Zend execs (Harold Goldberg, Andi Guttmans and Mark DeVisser) will kick things off with... READ MORE

If you're a private open source company, how do you compete against the likes of Google or VMWare for talent? At MySQL, we've found that one of the most attractive elements of the company is the fact that we are globally distributed. We have over 300 employees in nearly 30 countries. (That's in total, not 300 in each!) And over 70% of employees work from home. Among developers, the rate is over 90%. So that means that they don't have to commute, they don't have to hang out in boring HR meetings, they can just focus on what they like,... READ MORE

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I?ve spent the last year and a half noticing the growth and popularity of open source solutions. Using open source to build multi-tiered web based solutions can greatly add to a company?s competitiveness and bottom line by greatly reducing costs and reduce the complexity of managing vendor relationships. I looked at a lot of open source products and companies and the one that stood out to

I probably don't spend quite enough time following progress around MySQL considering how critical the product is to us. I'd like to consider it part of the infrastructure in a way I treat Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ie something I can trust to make good progress and follow up on a quarterly basis. Naturally we have people who watch both much more closely, but my time simply should, and pretty much is, spent doing something else.

However, it seems MySQL really demands a bit more attention right now. Today I went and read Jeremy Cole's opinion about MySQL Community (a failure), and I have to say I agree on many of the points. MySQL simply has not yet found a model that works as well as that of Red Hat's Fedora vs Enterprise …

Community version 1.2.1 of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL, a robust and intelligent solution for backup and recovery of MySQL databases is available for download at Zmanda downloads page.

Changes in this release:

1. Bug fixes
2. Source tar ball (including debian package files)
3. Help from ZRM online sites

For documentation see, ZRM for MySQL users manual. Please use bugzilla to report bugs and feature requests. If you have questions or feedback, please post them in forums.

Apparently while I was attending the BEAWorld and VMworld conferences in San Francisco this week, the pretty blue globe we call home kept on spinning, particularly where GPL v3 is concerned. On Wednesday an interview with Mr. Richard Stallman -- President of the Free Software Foundation -- was published in PC World Australia, from which I'd just like to reproduce a few choice quotes: Regarding the battle between Microsoft and Open (or as Richard puts it, "Free") Source community: Stallman: Nobody knows who will win this fight, because the outcome depends on you and the readers. Will you fight for... READ MORE

I mentioned the Gartner conference among a few of the upcoming open source events this fall. I've been to the past versions of this conference in Phoenix and in Orlando and it's a very good event for managers and newcomers to Open Source. It's not a hardcore technical conference like OSCON or the MySQL conference, but it's very good for its audience. Gartner has come a long way in recent years in helping IT organizations ramp up their use of open source with a carefully considered "best practices" approach backed by good research and thorough analysis. The Gartner guys that... READ MORE