By now, word has gotten around that MySQL has made some more changes to their process around MySQL Community Server. The changes primarily focus on:

• acceptance of community contributions (5.0 and 5.1 are now locked for contributions, so any contributions won’t be available until 5.2 or later)
• release schedule of community server (”Mature GA”, meaning 5.0, will have approximately 4 source builds per year and 2 binary builds; new GA, meaning 5.1, will have a binary build once per month)

These refinements of the community server [process] are detailed in Kaj Arnö’s blog. Not everyone is happy about the new plan for acceptance of community contributions, because it means that community enhancements have to wait a long time to see the light of day. Jeremy Cole has talked about the frustrations that this causes and calls the …

I met with some of the folks from Hyperic up at LinuxWorld San Francisco yesterday. They have just released the latest version of HQ 3.1, and won an award for best systems management software at the show. HQ is used at a growing number of companies including the likes of eHarmony, Ogilvey advertising and we also license their SIGAR technology at MySQL. What's unique about HQ is that the SIGAR technology is fully extensible so its easy to add new types of resources that can be monitored. The latest version adds the ability to manage ColdFusion, Jetty, TomCat6 along side... READ MORE

Spammers continue to find new ways to do their business and new ways to cause frustration for those of us who administer software that fosters small, open communities. These communities are fragile and grow up in a delicate environment. The environment needs to remain open: self-registration, the ability to post content, and the option of remaining anonymous is the key to success. Unfortunately, it is also a ripe environment for spammers to abuse.

Spammers have now discovered that bugzilla is one of those environments. For those who don’t know, bugzilla is one of the most common open source bug tracking tools. It is used by many open source projects to allow the community to assist in reporting bugs on and enhancement ideas for each project. The original version of Bugzilla was first created at Netscape in the mid-nineties (back when I was working at Netscape). It was rewritten in …

Alex forwarded me a link to an awesome scaling presentation by Cuong Do from YouTube about their architecture for scaling. He describes problems with massive scale-out, moving static content serving from Apache to lighttpd, how they use Python (including ways they speed it up) for the main application, certain custom C extensions for encryption, and their long road to MySQL partitioning.

A very interesting part of the presentation is Cuong's discussion of their difficulties dealing with thumbnail images for the videos. Each video has 4 thumbnails attached to it. The went through a whole series of issues in trying to scale the thumbnail serving, including hitting the ext3 files per directory limit one fateful day...

The section on scaling MySQL is a must see for anyone working on a Web 2.0 platform that can possibly see an enormous increase …

What is Freedom?

The concept of free software is very old - even older than the idea about software itself, because this is not a technology -this is a view of life, human, simple, and natural. Because this is the idea and feeling of freedom. This unimpaired freedom with which we are born and which we carry with us in the course of our lives. This is the same freedom, which leads our feelings of humanity and justice.

The Internet is a child of this freedom. The free software is its manifestation. Regardless of its statute as an innermost human right,
freedom is constantly under the attack of politicians, organizations, companies or separate persons while they try to adapt it to their
morals and views. However, limited freedom is no freedom at all! The best way to protect this freedom is to share it with others. To make them remember that they carry this freedom within and that they can and have the …

Could not resist the title after reading what Matt wrote. Sexy and exciting, indeed. Most of the crew here have their heads buried with the upcoming releases of Amanda Enterprise and Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL. We are continuing to enhance the Management console for Network backup. And with the next release of ZRM for MySQL, backup of MySQL database will never be the same. Dmitri already wrote about how easy it will be to manage MySQL backups from Iphone. Additionally we are fixing stuff in the Management console for ease of use. You can see, touch and feel them at LinuxWorld. …

A few of us from Solid are up in Portland at OSCON. We’ll be showing off a new prototype of our high availability (HA) option for solidDB for MySQL. The HA option allows solidDB for MySQL to act in a hot-standby configuration where there is a primary and secondary server. The data in the primary is automatically synchronously replicated to the secondary. In the case that the primary fails, our HA Manager automatically performs a failover and the secondary server becomes the new primary. The secondary is also always available for read-only requests.

We’ll also be talking about DorsalSource, a community-focused Web site whose goal is to provide developers with easy access to builds of MySQL and related products. Come by booth 820 on Wednesday or Thursday if you want to hear more, …

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A few weeks ago, I had a chance to speak with Scott Swigart about MySQL, open source, development and community challenges, and other stuff. He sent me a link to the published interview, available on HowSoftwareIsBuilt.com. It was very interesting reading the comments of some of the other interviewees, like Stormy Peters, from OpenLogic, and Patrick Hogan, from NASA.

A few weeks back, I posted a couple of blog entries on my recent trip to China. We have seen huge MySQL download numbers from Brazil, Russia, India, China (or "BRIC") with very significant growth in the last few years in China. I tried reading a book by Robert Buderi called "Guanxi (The Art of Relationships) - Microsoft, China and Bill Gates's Plan to Win the Road Ahead" on the development of Microsoft's research lab in China. However, the title should have been a warning to me. As much as I wanted to dive into this book it was just... READ MORE