TheOpenForce.com

Jim Starkey and Falcon

Jim Starkey, who joined MySQL through our acquisition of his company Netfrastructure, has been working along with his team on the Falcon storage engine, which is part of MySQL 6.0, currently in alpha.  Jim has a history of introducing significant innovations in database technology throughout his career including his work on Blobs and multi-generational storage (or MVCC).  Right now the focus of the Falcon team is on optimizing performance for modern multi-core CPUs with large amounts of memory.  We're seeing some pretty significant performance gains that will come out over the next few months. And there's still a lot of untapped potential in what Falcon will be able to do going forward.

Jim took some time out of his schedule to answer a few questions for Dr. Dobb's Journal and the result is a short but insightful interview called Databases: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.  More info on Falcon is available on the MySQL developer zone. 

• Dr Dobbs Journal: Databases: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
• MySQL: Falcon, White paper, FAQ, Docs, Downloads, Understanding Falcon - Part 1, 2, 3

Disruption Articles

I've written a few articles on disruption over at my brother's site www.ondisruption.com.  While most people think about disruption only from a technical point of view, you can find disruption across many areas, whether it's the business model, development approach, distribution etc. I've also written a couple of pieces about how disruption can impact your career and what to do about it.

At any rate, here are the links:

• Heineken: Disrupting a Commodity Business
• Are You a Sitting Duck?
• Should You Pack a Parachute?
• XBox Guitar Hero Melts Face Off Old School Rockers
• 4 Management Lessons for Rock Guitar Wars