VentureBeat and OStatic are among the news source reporting the launch of Cloudera a new vendor set up to provide support for Apache Hadoop and related projects.

Given the current economic outlook it’s great to see a new open source start-up rearing its head, and the list of founders indicates that this one has a good chance of survival. While VentureBeat is focused on the fact that Ex-Google, Yahoo, and Facebook employees are on the team, my eye was caught by the fact that Mike Oslon, Sleepycat Software founder and former CEO has been tempted out of semi-retirement.

(Or “the return of 451 CAOS Links“)

Having been a bit busy for the last three weeks I have a bit of catching up to do on the latest open source software news. Here’s the headlines that caught my eye.

MySQL co-founder resigns from Sun
No, not that one. David Axmark resigned stating “I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them. It would be far better for me to “retire” from employment and work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis.” If I may paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one co-founder may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both …

Pimp My Drive by Richard and Barb

There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not, so I did what any enterprising geek would do: Built a box, threw some data on it, and tossed it into production to see if it would sink or swim.

I’m a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMug’s datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and …

So, I recently ran into one of those situations where a customer complains that his MySQL database is slow, and “it worked great until about two weeks ago”. The first thing I look at in these situations is not the queries or any code, but the indexes. Once I determined that the indexes were almost nonsensical, I had a look at the queries themselves, which proved that the indexes were, in fact, nonsensical. Running the queries as written in the code, from a mysql shell, with EXPLAIN, I was able to further confirm that the indexes (most of them, anyway) were never used.

Easy right? Just reindex the table!

NOTE: I’m going to skip the talk about all of the database design issues on this gig and just go straight to solving the immediate problem at hand. Just know that I had nothing to do with the design.

But, supposing this table has 15 million rows and is running on a machine with 2GB of RAM and only …

I thought I'd share a note I sent earlier in the week to Sun's leaders - about the turmoil we're seeing in the markets, and how I want our team focusing their efforts.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Begin forwarded message:
From: Jonathan Schwartz
Date: September 30, 2008 12:02:29 AM PDT
To: All Sun
Subject: Headlines, Financial Crisis, etc.

You can't have missed today's headlines - the American Congress failed to pass a critical bill authorizing the Treasury to put a floor under the US banking sector. The market swooned, and politicians in the US, and across the world, are bickering over the right long term answer - jump in and take action to save the troubled institutions, or step aside and …

I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.10 has been released.

You can download the updated package from the project home page or via the openSUSE Build Service.

This version fixes some bugs and includes new functionality:

• Applied patch from Marc Haber: added option --keep_snapshot that will skip the removal of the backup snapshot before terminating the script. Providing the option --backuptype=none will now skip creating a backup using the builtin backup modules. Both options provide more flexibility when using hooks for performing the actual backup tasks or when the snapshot is considered to be the actual backup.
• Added two new hooks: "backupsuccess" and "backupfailure" which are called respectively upon success of failure of the backup operation (Bug #264089) …

I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.10 has been released.

You can download the updated package from the project home page or via the openSUSE Build Service.

This version fixes some bugs and includes new functionality:

• Applied patch from Marc Haber: added option --keep_snapshot that will skip the removal of the backup snapshot before terminating the script. Providing the option --backuptype=none will now skip creating a backup using the builtin backup modules. Both options provide more flexibility when using hooks for performing the actual backup tasks or when the snapshot is considered to be the actual backup.
• Added two new hooks: "backupsuccess" and "backupfailure" which are called respectively upon success of failure of the backup operation (Bug #264089) …

Until this week Infobright’s claim to open source fame was its partnership with MySQL that enabled its analytical data warehousing software to act as a storage engine for the open source database.

However, the company is now taking the open source route itself by releasing the code behind its Infobright data warehouse (formerly Brighthouse) as Infobright Community Edition.

Earlier this month the company announced that it was moving to a subscription model for the commercial version of the product, Infobright Enterprise Edition, which comes with “enhanced features, services and support, warranty” amongst other things.

The company has also announced a $10m Series C investment …

Agenda:

* Red Hat buys Qumranet
* Google’s Chrome browser
* Status of MySQL founder and CTO at Sun

iTunes or direct download (26:30, 6.1MB)