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Dana Blankenhorn asks whether open source is hurt by piracy, prompted by comments made by Louis Suarez-Potts, Sun’s community manager for OpenOffice.org at OSCON.

Dana is unconvinced that open source supporters should necessarily be doing anything about piracy, noting that “There is no direct financial loss to Open Office when someone has a pirated copy of Microsoft Office. To the extent that BSA enforcement actions cause fear in the market, that just benefits open source, so why join it?”

He also notes that “On the other hand if we helped Oracle enforce its license terms we might accelerate the move to MySQL and Ingres.”

However, one need only remember these comments from last year made by the president of Microsoft’s business division, Jeff Raikes, to understand why piracy is bad for open source:

“Our number one goal is that we want people to use our product. If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else. And that’s because we understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the install base of people who are using our products.

What you hope to do is over time you hope to convert them to licensing the software, legally licensing it, so on, and so forth,” he added, neatly - and presumably accidentally - describing the method by which commercial open source vendors benefit by making their core code available free of charge.

So it’s always a delicate balance, because what you want to do is you want to push towards getting legal licensing, but you don’t want to push so hard that you lose the asset that’s most fundamental in the business.”

Additionally on our recent virtual tour of Europe we saw how piracy was seen as a barrier to further adoption of open source in countries like Greece and Romania.

Supported by government, open source can be used as a tool defeat piracy. Louis explained, ComputerWorld reports that: “By cracking down on software piracy, nations around the globe are starting to see that they can help themselves dramatically by encouraging innovation and creativity — as well as job growth and richer economies — through open-source development.”

An example of this is Russia, where Microsoft’s bungled attempt to crack down on software piracy resulted in a decision by the government to reduce piracy and encourage local business by encouraging the use of open source software.

Daniel Nichter, the author of several very useful MySQL tools, has joined with Percona to continue to improve Maatkit — the “other” toolkit we rely on daily. Daniel is a skilled Perl programmer who understands MySQL. He is in a perfect position to move the project forward on a more regular basis than I’ve been able to commit time to since I’ve taken on a leadership role in Percona.

Right now he’s working on an unreleased tool we will use to make our performance audits more efficient. As a result, we’ll be able to deliver more value to our customers and assess servers more quickly in the event of an emergency. (By the way, if you’d like to sponsor features you need for a Maatkit tool, contact us and we’ll be glad to discuss it with you.)

Welcome, Daniel! And a toast to Maatkit’s continued improvement and usefulness!

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In an internal mail thread, I was asked whether there would be any “objections from an integration perspective” to some Sun initiated plans for a more organised French MySQL community.

My reply was that it’s great, if it’s something related to the self-organisation of the already very active French MySQL community (as witnessed for instance by the huge numbers that Véronique Loquet of Al’x Communication attracted to our Paris meetup in April). But if it’s about a centrally-imposed structure of “marketing towards the user base”, then I want to understand more and we need to discuss a bit further.

Based on the video link that Véronique sent me, it seems to be more of the former — or if it’s the latter, then they seem to have got it just right, for an event planned for 19 September 2008.

This is one of the best MySQL videos — at least the funniest — that I’ve seen so far!

As for the 19 Sep 2008 event, I hope I can make it, but it might be tough. Take a look at the video, and you know why (specifically why I hope to make it, not why it might be tough).

Text:

START TRANSACTIONS;
INSERT INTO plage (fille) VALUE ('mignonne');
DELETE FROM beaugosse WHERE cheveux LIKE 'Blond';
UPDATE geek SET serial = 'Lover';
REPLACE HIGH_PRIORITY INTO Love (FILLE, MEC) VALUES ('MOI', 'TOI');
COMMIT;

Glossary:

• plage = beach
• fille = girl
• mec = guy
• mignonne = beautiful
• beaugosse = handsome
• cheveux = hair
• moi = me
• toi = you

La communauté MySQL se donne rdv;
le 19/09/2008;
à la cantine;
à partir de 18H;

Plus d’informations bientôt sur lacantine.org

Geek: Victor Rieunier;
fille: Mathilde Mallen;
Production: QNTV;
Réalisation: Morgan;
Musique: amsteroller;

Links:

• Movie-teaser: http://vpod.tv/QuartierNumeriqueTV/526842

Brian Aker was at the Sun booth today, in a premier slot, where there must have been about 50-60 people, huddled around, to listen to him talk about Drizzle. The project motivations, what’s behind it, what its not aimed to be, and so much more. Check the video out (21 minutes long)!

The Birds of a Feather (BoF) session in the night, was well attended, and there was lots of large discussion on what’s next. I think the important message to take away is that Drizzle doesn’t aim to be MySQL, and there are no plans to “merge” things back (fixes where the code-base is shared though, might make sense). Its also important that the design is for the future, i.e. multi-core machines. It was great to see Brian say that this really leverages Sun in many ways.

Its worth nothing that Sheeri was at the lightning talk, and has a shorter, 8 minute video recording too.

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As there were many requests for Debian binary packages in our announcement of MySQL releases with custom patchsets, we decided to play with it and built .deb, which you can find there:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/mysql/debian/

Also we have generic RPMs for x86-64 architecture:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/mysql/RPM/. They are based on .spec file provided in MySQL source tree and should be compatible with SuSe, CentOS and RedHat.

Your comments are welcome!

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The presentation about MySQL Proxy at OSCON 2008 is over.

Here are the slides.

Thanks to my co-presenter Ronald Bradford and to all the participants. If you have more questions about the session, please use this blog's comments.

This DBA course day is in part based on info from Peter Zaitsev's earlier explorations (thanks Peter), and of course new insights from the High Performance MySQL book (there's a lot of Baron in there, all credit to his great work!), wisdom from Mark Callaghan, with my own teach approach and style thrown in to turn it into a good yet fun educational day!

Just like with other topics, extending this to a full day allows the issue to be explored much better rather than getting skimmed over as a small part of a much bigger course. After all, if you understand the tool, how it does things and why, you can utilise it more optimally. The skimming wouldn't help you in this sense.

I still have some customers use MyISAM (out of habit mainly) but the default storage engine really is InnoDB, effectively, even if the server build does not see it that way by default ;-) But there is more to tune, things to know. Just converting to InnoDB does not make the application run any better necessarily. It might reduce lock contention in some cases (like update heavy apps), but the overall running might be slower without the right setup. While maintaining ACID, there's much that can be done.

The course is part of the DBA course days that Open Query has currently scheduled in cities around Australia, and in Auckland New Zealand. For dates that are still a few months away you can get up to $50 off (per person/per day) for early bookings.

Disclosure: I am on the advisory board for MindTouch.

Double disclosure: I really, really like the latest release of MindTouch Deki (formerly "Deki Wiki").

MindTouch has always thought that a wiki should be about more than simply creating basic web pages. With its new "Kilen Woods" release, the company has significantly bent the rules as to what constitutes a wiki, and just which data sources can feed into a wiki.

LinkedIn? Yep. Salesforce.com? Sure. SugarCRM. Uh-huh.

MindTouch Deki enables businesses to connect and mashup the growing number of application and data silos that exist across an enterprise - including legacy systems, CRM and ERP applications, databases, and Web 2.0 applications....For example, MindTouch Deki can visualize content from a Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Access databases and mash it up with other services, such as Microsoft Live Earth or Google maps, LinkedIn and a CRM system - offering a common wiki and web-service interface for content and behavior from multiple sources.

eWeek and others have some good reviews. Me? I just like that I don't have to learn any wiki language to use it. Take a look for yourself:

...

We were at the Sun+Zend party last night, and it was a blast (thank you Jesse Silver!). If you’re a PostgreSQL or MySQL user/developer or just a general database geek, you should’ve been there. Why?

(watch the video if its stripped in your feed reader)

Monty Widenius (MySQL) and Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL), decided to start sumo wrestling! It ended with a 5-0 score, advantage MySQL.

An attendee Tim Moore twittered: “Postgres is totally losing the sumo match. I’m migrating all of my databases to MySQL tomorrow.”

Monty says, this is what we do to people that leave Sun! In fact, if you didn’t already know, Josh Berkus, my esteemed colleague in the Database Group at Sun Microsystems, is leaving his post as the PostgreSQL Team Lead. We met for the first time, face to face at foss.in last year, and all I can say is I’m truly saddened to see him leave. But thanks to the magic of the open source world, we’ll still be interacting, I’m sure. Good luck Josh! (and better sumo practising next time, mmmkay?)

Brian Aker gives the “zinger” lightning talk about the newly announced “Drizzle”. This short (under 8 minutes) video captures Aker’s highlights of why he started the Drizzle project and how Drizzle is different from MySQL — both in what has been removed from MySQL and what features Drizzle can accomodate.

Play the video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/576/play or download the 116 Mb file at http://technocation.org/node/576/download.

Brian Aker gives the "zinger" lightning talk about the newly announced "Drizzle". This short (under 8 minutes) video captures Aker's highlights of why he started the Drizzle project and how Drizzle is different from MySQL -- both in what has been removed from MySQL and what features Drizzle can accomodate.

Play the video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/576/play or download the 116 Mb file at http://technocation.org/node/576/download.

Today I presented with Giuseppe Maxia of Sun Microsystems Inc at OSCON 08 on “MySQL Proxy: From Architecture to Implementation”. I was surprised to find that MySQL has a strong showing with a number of presentations this week.

Our talk covered the basics of MySQL Proxy, what’s coming in future features, and a number of examples of how I have used Proxy in consulting engagements to improve the information retrieval particularly for identifying performance problems.

Download Presentations Slides

My Normalization session seemed to go well enough.

Video is online at: http://www.mikehillyer.com/video/oscon_2008.html.

I’m attempting this is be as unbiased as possible, since I write the Monolith application. This will hopefully help one decide between a free MySQL server monitoring system and paying for a per-server based licensed product. Both have strengths and weaknesses that should be pointed out before making a decision. You can infer the weaknesses based on the strengths below. That said, let’s just get into it.

Strengths of each product over the other

Monolith - MySQL DBA Console

• presents overall database size, index size, data size, number of schema per server, and aggregate statistics for all monitored servers
• runs mysql server backups remotely and reports on backup state execution
• collects cnf files from each server during the talkback script execution for historical viewing
• built on the LAMP stack, no need for tomcat/jboss knowlege
• provides overall server report, and change control documentation with recommended actions for tuning the server(s)
• application can run under Redhat Cluster Services for high availability
• comes with XML export API for off-application data processing and trending
• compatible with Visual Mining
• is FREE software, GPL licensed, costs absolutely nothing to the user

MySQL Enterprise Dashboard

• customizable alerting instead of fixed alerts
• fine tuned date range graphing (from date to date instead of last X days)
• support for bug tracking that utilizes hooks into bugs.mysql.com
• uses local server agent for information gathering, allows CPU and OS memory to be reported on
• presentation design is arguably more easy on the eyes
• comes with the MySQL Enterprise Server software, and thus a support contract from MySQL/Sun.
• customizable organization of server list instead of organization by client name

Feel free to post your viewpoints on each if you have used both products. I’m always interested in what users have to say.

You can get Monolith here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/monolith-mysql

You can get MySQL Enterprise here: http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/ 

So, most of you have heard about Drizzle by now.  For those that have not, you can check out many, many blog posts or the Launchpad page.

The thread on Slashdot about Drizzle was quite negative.  Most misunderstand what Drizzle is about.  SQLite is not a good solution when you have 100 web servers.  Let me describe how it I would use it and maybe that will help some understand it.

When it comes to MySQL use, dealnews has two very different use cases.  The first is an enterprise storage system that involves content creation, reporting and data warehousing.  For that layer of our business, we are using more and more advanced features as they become available.  We use triggers and stored procedures.  We use complex data types for specific use cases.  All those features are a big gain.

The other way that we use MySQL is for serving content to our readers.  I have written about this before.  For this purpose, we avoid joins, don’t use any advanced features.  We do use replication, indexes and intelligent queries.  We don’t (as one slashdot reader claimed) do all of our processing in the code.  That would be stupid.  If you do that you are ignorant.  I will stop talking about that before this becomes a rant.  I do believe in letting MySQL do my work for me.

This is where Drizzle fits in.  To serve content, I don’t need stored procedures, triggers, views or any of that other stuff.  The whole database that the front end web servers use is basically a view.  It is a denormalized, prepared version of the real data.  I store objects. But, I have to be able to sort and filter the data in a way that SQL allows me to do.  CouchDB sounds interesting.  Maybe one day it will be there.  It is sill in the optimization phase.

Now, some say that this is just MySQL 3.x all over again.  Well, you clearly have not been listening to the really smart people that are working on Drizzle.  They are doing more than just removing the 4.1 and 5.x features from MySQL.  They are removing things that don’t make sense for this use case.  They are adding things that do make sense.  They are replacing parts of the code base where there is a better library or way of doing it.  At this point, they have no feature requirements to meet.  They have no deadlines.  They are making what they think the high volume web world and/or cloud computing needs.  They are making it plugable:  think Apache modules or PHP extensions.  So, if you need feature XYZ that was yanked out, you can add it back in (hopefully) via the internal API.  There is a lot more going on here than just removing “features”.

So, I am cheering on the folks working on Drizzle.  I have joined their community and will provide what feedback I can from userland.  I am no C++ coder.  I can read it.  I can debug it.  But, writing it or doing heavy lifting is not in my skill set.  Hopefully I can contribute

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Let me first say that the PBXT storage engine has some great people behind it. At the users conference last April, I had a chance to meet Paul McCullagh, who created PBXT, and some of the people who work on it. They are dedicated individuals who are creating something unique.

Like the InnoDB storage engine, which is backed by the Innobase company, PBXT has a company that backs it, Primebase Technologies. This means that if needed, support can be got from the company that created the product. For enterprise companies this might be important.

The basics characteristics of PBXT:

• MVCC: Multi-version concurrency control, enables reading without locking.
• Transactional: Support for BEGIN, COMMIT and ROLLBACK and recovery on startup.
• ACID compliant: Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable (once committed, changes cannot be lost).
• Row-level locking: updates use row-level locking, allowing for maximum concurrency.
• Deadlock detection: immediate notification if client processes are deadlocked.
• Referential Integrity: foreign-key support.
• Write-once: PBXT avoids double-writes by using a log-based architecture.

Much of this is the same as for the other transactional storage engines, so I won’t spend time on them. What sets PBXT apart from other storage engines is the write-once characteristic. It is worth understanding.

(more…)

A report suggests 5%-15% of IT jobs call for open source software skills. Understand the research methodology before deciding where to focus your learning. READ MORE