Though the event is still happening in Charlottesville, VA Nov. 14-16th (Fri night through Sunday), the new web page for OpenSQL Camp is http://www.opensqlcamp.org. The content has been ported over to MediaWiki, and a captcha has been put in place that is activated on any page change that adds an external URL.

Whether you are into MySQL, PostgreSQL, Drizzle, or some other open source SQL database, go forth and register for OpenSQL Camp, without having to login! (Disclosure: if you do not create a login, your IP is tracked.)

As part of a project of Technocation, Inc I took a whole bunch of videos at OSCon 2008. The conference was about a month ago, and about 2 weeks ago I’d finished processing and uploading all the videos, but it was only today where I had the 5-6 hours I needed to finish posting all the video, and making this matrix of video.

The video may not be the quality that the O’Reilly folks took and put up on blip tv’s OSCon site, but all the videos here are freely downloadable or playable in your browser.

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I have not said much about Drizzle here; that is because there is not much to say. It is premature, really, to say anything about it at this point. Some have said they will support Drizzle; as Pythian supports several database systems, it is very likely that we will support Drizzle as well. Particularly since there is in-house Drizzle expertise already. But I digress; my point is that it is premature to really say much about Drizzle.

My involvement in Drizzle goes back to around the end of April/beginning of May 2008. Given my early involvement, (more…)

In two words: online operations. In a paragraph: Forget partitioning, row-based replication and events. The big reasons most people are going to salivate over 5.1, and probably start plans to upgrade now, are the online operations:

• online ALTER TABLE for column rename, column default value change, and adding values to the end of an ENUM/SET
• Online, table-based logging. No more need to restart your server to enable or change the general or slow query logs. You can have the standard file-based output or choose a table format…which you can query.

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My parents instilled upon me many values that I keep with me today. My twin brother and I are the youngest of four children, coming from a lower-middle class background. We children had the inevitable fights over material possessions, screeching “Mine! Mine!”

My father’s response to this was to look at us and say “These toys are mine; I bought those toys with money I worked for. What’s yours is what you make with your bodies.” While the sentiment is arguably harsh, crude and bordering on vulgar, I cannot argue that he had a certain point.

If you do not truly own something, you will be left squabbling like a child when your perceived ownership is threatened. When you assumed you owned something and the truth comes to light, you will be massively insecure and have a sense of injustice.

A few points from OSCon are haunting me and getting me to think about what FLOSS means to me, and what I want from it.

— Open source is important even if you never read one line of source code or make one modification. The fact that anyone can read and write the source code is critical even if nobody besides the original engineer(s) ever does.

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An event truly fitting an “open world” — I will be speaking at Oracle Open World.

How does a wild-mannered MySQL DBA like me get to speak at an Oracle conference? Well, after I received the MySQL Community Award two years in a row, Dan Norris contacted me, and encouraged me to submit a proposal with him on how to contribute to the community.

Oracle has a formal program for recognizing community members at two levels: the Oracle ACE Director, and the Oracle ACE. An Oracle ACE Director is expected to make a 12-month commitment to working with the community, while an Oracle ACE is bestowed upon folks to recognize their volunteer efforts in the past. More information about the program can be found on the Oracle ACE Program FAQ.

Dan Norris is himself an Oracle ACE Director, and I think it is a good sign that he reached out to the MySQL community to help the Oracle community. As database administrators and developers, I think we all have much to learn from each other, and I hope this cross-pollination will continue.

If anyone attending Oracle OpenWorld, (or who happens to be in San Francisco from Sunday, September 21st through Thursday, September 26th) wants to meet me or have dinner with me, drop me a line!

The MySQL Community version is different in theory from the Enterprise version in relation to the following points:

0) It’s free
1) It has community patches
2) It is released less often
3) It is tested less strictly

In reality, the first two differences are not applicable — the binaries and source code for Enterprise can be freely and legally downloaded at http://mirror.provenscaling.com/mysql/enterprise/. The process for adding community patches to the MySQL source code has not been changed sufficiently to be able to actually add community patches and encourage more community development.

I understand that MySQL (and now Sun) needs to make money. I also understand that development takes a lot of effort, and seeing an ROI is important. The Community/Enterprise split was designed to have tradeoffs on both sides. However, currently there is no benefit to running the Community version.

While I would love to magically make community contributions easy to put into a Community version of MySQL, logistically that’s not possible right now. I do have a solution that is possible right now, that takes very few additional resources, and is something I think will be acceptable to the MySQL community and to Sun — assuming the MySQL executives can admit that the Community version has not been working out.

I propose to make the Community release an older version of an Enterprise release. In this way, Enterprise users still get value in having bugs fixed and features added first, and Community users can choose to upgrade if they want the latest features. There is very little overhead in having Community releases, with no overhead in having to manage two trees/branches/whatever from both a code and build standpoint. Maintaining the promise of immediate security releases, 4 code releases per year and 2 binary releases per year becomes trivial.

The question is, of course, how far back the Community version should go. And should there be a delay (ie, release the January Enterprise version as the June Community version) or not?

I recommend that security releases be immediate (as they currently are) and for all other releases there should be a delay of at least 6 months, perhaps 1 year. Certainly that’s enough of an incentive to get customers to upgrade without having folks feel like the Community ersion is crippleware.

What do folks think of this as a solution to the Enterprise/Community split dilemma?

Exceptional Software Explained: Embrace Error, by Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz of Asurion. One of the contenders for “best open source comedian”, r0ml delivers a humorous look at the past and future of software development models. This keynote was delivered at OSCon 2008 on Tuesday evening.

Play this 20 minute video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/577/play or download the 286 Mb file directly at http://technocation.org/node/577/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.

Well, nobody from Sun showed up in person, but we got a great rendition of “Where were you when you heard THE NEWS that Sun bought MySQL?” from Mark Rubin, the MySQL Sales Engineer for the New England area, and from Giuseppe Maxia, who revealed something very interesting and riveting.

From there, Giuseppe gave a short talk on what it’s like to work at MySQL, and then we moved on to the topic of the user group meeting, “What is MySQL Cluster Good For?”

The slides for the talk are downloadable in PDF Format 61kB and Flash (SWF) format, 31kB

The video can be played at http://technocation.org/node/572/play and downloaded (404 Mb) at http://technocation.org/node/572/download.