I have, in the past, worked for startups of varying forms. I worked for a spinoff that ultimately failed but had the most awesome product I’ve ever seen (neural networks were involved, need I say more?), I helped a buddy very early on with his startup, which did great until angel investors crept in, destroyed his vision, and failed completely to understand the Long Tail vision my buddy was trying to achieve, and I worked for a web 2.0 startup which was pretty successful, and was subsequently purchased… by another startup!

Working in academia for 6 years also exposed me to people who are firing up businesses, or projects that accidentally become businesses, and some of those go nowhere, while others seem to be on the verge of NYSE listing now, while a year ago they were housed in the smallest office I’ve ever seen, using lawn furniture for their workstations.

Of course, I’ve also consulted for, and been interviewed by, a …

I’ve started an investigation of MySQL Backups using LVM. I’m working with Lenz’s mylvmbackup but I found it both used Perl and needed a number of dependencies installed.

Installing dependencies failed on my test system, yet I found it actually worked when I went back to my dev system (but it is not configured with LVM for full testing).

$ sudo cpan Config::IniFiles Sys::Syslog Date::Format Getopt::Long  DBI

Details of error:

....
 CPAN.pm: Going to build S/SA/SAPER/Sys-Syslog-0.27.tar.gz

WARNING: LICENSE is not a known parameter.
Checking if your kit is complete...
Looks good
'LICENSE' is not a known MakeMaker parameter name.
Writing Makefile for Sys::Syslog
cp Syslog.pm blib/lib/Sys/Syslog.pm
/usr/bin/perl /usr/share/perl/5.8/ExtUtils/xsubpp -noprototypes …

Back in October last year a corporate accountability group called As You Sow attempted to persuade Oracle to detail its commitment to open source by publishing an Open Source Social Responsibility Report.

Oracle resisted the proposal but did promise to share more details on its use of open source in the next version of its Oracle’s Commitment social responsibility report. I just noticed that the renamed Oracle Corporate Citizenship Report (Pdf) was recently published (in late November as far as I can make out) and does indeed include a section on Oracle’s commitment to open source.

In the section “Open Source and Accessibility” Oracle notes that …

FYI, we've now added an Italian section on Planet MySQL: http://it.planetmysql.org

If you are a MySQL enthusiast from Italy and would like to start blogging about it in your native language, please consider submitting your feed for inclusion!

Giuseppe just recently started blogging in Italian as well and has already added his feed there.

FYI, we've now added an Italian section on Planet MySQL: http://it.planetmysql.org

If you are a MySQL enthusiast from Italy and would like to start blogging about it in your native language, please consider submitting your feed for inclusion!

Giuseppe just recently started blogging in Italian as well and has already added his feed there.

Linux Defenders formed to protect against patents. Sun adds new board members and officially announces MySQL 5.1. Microsoft releases open source content management system. Google’s secret OS? And more.

Official announcements
Open Invention Network and Partners Unveil Landmark ‘Linux Defenders’ Program to Give the Open Source Community Greater Freedom Open Invention Network

Sun Microsystems and Southeastern Asset Management Agree to Appoint New Independent Members to Sun’s Board of Directors Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems Releases MySQL 5.1 - Boosts Performance & Simplifies Management of Large-Scale Database Applications …

In response to a number of comments, I thought I would clarify the scope of my discussion regarding Options using MySQL pairs before I begin. As mentioned their is no one way or type of configuration for MySQL in a HA solution, however the simplest progression from a single Master/Slave environment is the concept of a pair of servers, configured to support a fail over and fail back via MySQL Replication.

The concept of a MySQL Pair in this context is to have a “hot” MySQL standby ready for controlled and hopefully! automated fail over. I say hopefully because with MySQL Replication as an asynchronous solution there is no guarantee for no loss of data.

I consider DRBD/Heatbeat for example a “cold” standby, as MySQL on the slave server is not actually running. DRBD does provide …

When Monty Widenius published his criticisms of MySQL 5.1 recently a lot of the coverage that followed focused on his belief that the product had been made generally available too early and has too many serious bugs.

A solution to this problem would have been told hold 5.1 back even longer for more testing or, better still, not to have announced it as a release candidate so early. However, reading Monty’s post in full indicates that this would be a matter of treating the symptoms rather than finding a cure.

He also wrote: “the MySQL current development model doesn’t in practice allow the MySQL community to participate in the development of the MySQL server” and “I think it’s time to seriously review how the MySQL server is being developed and change the development model to be more like Drizzle and …

Topics for this podcast:

* Open source getting, and going without VC investment
* Oracle contributions to Linux and open source
* Sun’s latest moves with MySQL database and version 5.1
* Linux in high-end computing

iTunes or direct download (25:50, 6.0 MB)

The FOSDEM 2009 organizers have been very kind to us this year: in addition to a Developer Room on Sunday, we now also have a project desk (1 table) on both days! Thank you very much! In summary, this means that there will be the following MySQL-related activities:

• We will have a Project Stand (one table) on both days
• On Sunday, we will have a MySQL Developer Room, allowing us to schedule our own track of talks about MySQL and related projects
• I have been invited to give a talk about "MySQL High Availability Solutions" in the main conference track
• I also submitted two proposals for lightning talks ("What's new in MySQL 5.1" and "Why you should use Bazaar for maintaining your OSS …