Despite my best intentions, I haven't posted on this blog for a while, which is a shame! I've become busy writing on so many other places since I moved into my new role in the Oracle Linux product management team in April. I've learned a lot and I am feeling quite at home here! The team is excellent and very nice to work with — I am slowly getting the "Big Picture".

But even though I've been neglecting this blog, there are a lot of things that are publicly visible and document some of my activites:

I've created two podcasts for the Oracle Linux podcasts:

• OCFS2: Features and Benefits
• …

It's been a while since my last post on this blog; I definitely need to get back into the habit! One of the reasons for my radio silence was that I switched roles here at Oracle. After having been with the MySQL team for 9 years, I felt it was time for a change. Fortunately I did not have to look far – I'm now a member of the Oracle Linux product management team and I am having a lot of fun there.

However, I realized that while I was an active Linux user on the desktop, quite a lot has happened on the enterprise and data center side of things. Linux has really come a long way and I am glad to be back in this field, drinking from the firehose and learning a lot about recent developments and technologies. For me, this is kind of going "back to my roots", as I have been deeply involved with Linux at SuSE before I joined MySQL in 2002.

Anyway, I'm still alive and you can expect …

So you're a small startup company, ready to go live with your product, which you intend to distribute under an Open Source License. Congratulations, you made a wise decision! Your developers have been hacking away frantically, getting the code in good shape for the initial launch. Now it's time to look into what else needs to be built and setup, so you're ready to welcome the first members of your new community and to ensure they are coming back!

Keep the following saying in mind, which especially holds true in the Open Source world: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression!". While the most important thing is of course to have a compelling and useful product, this blog post is an attempt to highlight some other aspects about community building and providing the adequate infrastructure. This insight is based on my own experiences and my …

Thankfully my RSS reader has builtin-search capability, so I can quickly skim the full RSS feed from blogs.sun.com for keywords of interest. I found the following articles quite helpful:

• Setting up MySQL Cluster using Solaris Zones by Hashamkha Pathan walks through the steps involved of setting up a virtual MySQL Cluster setup on a single Solaris instance (for evaluation purposes only - this is probably not the best idea for a productive HA environment)
• Mixing SQL and shell commands in MySQL by Amit Saha explains how to write scripts that execute both SQL statements and unix shell commands using the MySQL command line client
• …

I recently received a review copy of the book "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing) and finished reading it a few days ago.

The subtitle "A fast and practical guide" is a matching description - I managed to read the ~130 pages over the course of a week. The book is by no means an exhaustive reference manual, but it gives the reader a good overview about Xen and assists with performing the first steps and getting started.

Continue reading "Book review: "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing)"

IBM plans a residency to write a Redbook about the IBM DB2 for i5/OS as a Database Engine for MySQL:

Seize this opportunity to be among the first, elite IBM System i professionals worldwide to gain hands-on and practical experience with the MySQL on i5/OS. Working alongside and exchanging knowledge with some of the top database experts in the System i, you will develop a competitive edge that will serve you well in successful service delivery to System i clients. MySQL is used extensively with opensource PHP applications. As our customers deploy PHP web applications, many of them are looking to run MySQL as well.

The …

I am happy to announce that my MySQL Dev Zone interview with David Axmark just went live - if you are curious to hear a few stories about how David and Monty started this whole thing more than 10 years ago, make sure to spend a few minutes and read it here!

Paul McCullagh works on a new pluggable transactional Storage Engine for MySQL, called PrimeBase XT. I met him for an interview a few days ago - you can now read it on the MySQL Developer Zone. Enjoy and have a nice weekend!

Some days ago I interviewed Ian Linden, the Director of Operations at Linden Lab (the company behind the virtual world simulation Second Life) about Second Life, Linux, MySQL and other OSS usage for their operations. I actually performed the interview inside of Second Life, which was quite fun, especially now that there is a Linux client! You can read the full interview on the MySQL Developer Zone. Have a nice weekend!

Update: The interview is now listed on the Featured Articles page on the MySQL Developer Zone, too. If you would like to know more about Second Life and MySQL, Ian will …

The release of MySQL 5.0 introduced the MySQL Instance Manager (IM), which intends to replace the mysqld_safe wrapper script as well as the mysqld_multi script that keeps track of multiple MySQL instances running on the same machine.

This article will qive you a quick overview about the IM and how to enable and configure a minimal setup that uses the IM to manage the default mysqld instance. I used MySQL 5.1.7-beta for my tests, some of this may work differently on other versions of MySQL.

Continue reading "Enabling and using the MySQL …