Forrester published a study a few months back sponsored by Bull showing some pretty good stats on open source software adoption, both at the infrastructure and application levels.
There's also a good blog by Paolo from OpenBravo on a related topic on commercial open source business models and other factoids from the recent OSBC conference.
Earlier today, MySQL 5.1 was downloaded for the millionth time. Pretty cool! I wonder if we can find out who the lucky downloader is who got the millionth copy. Maybe we could embarass them with a MySQL logo prize or something at the MySQL Conference April 20-23 in Santa Clara.
Congrats to all those who created MySQL 5.1, to all our users, to the many who found, fixed or otherwise helped us chase down bugs. Thank you for making this a great release!
If that was too cryptic, here's the news: we've extended the deadline on the Call for Papers for the upcoming MySQL User Conference which will be held April 20-23 in Santa Clara CA. You've got until Nov 5 to get your proposals in.
If you want to increase your odds of being accepted, here are some tips:
And for those who didn't notice, MySQL 5.1 is now in its final RC candidate (this time for sure!) with Version 5.1.29 now available. We've been running this version internally on our web site and it looks great. At this point we are down to a handful of final bugs to fix before it gets declared GA. Thanks to everyone who has helped find or fix bugs in 5.1!
Although we had previously planned to make MySQL 5.1.26 RC into the GA or production release, we've decided to instead incorporate two more release candidates into the schedule. The goal is to make sure that MySQL 5.1 is absolutely rock solid, even if it takes a few more months to release it as GA. Given the additional two releases candidates, I expect MySQL 5.1 will GA in late November of this year.
First of all, there will be several dozen additional bug fixes included in a 5.1.28 release expected to be available mid-September. Many of these bug fixes were completed and queued up ready to go after the GA release as part of our monthly rapid update cycle. Since the GA obviously didn't happen, we're incorporating these into the RC immediately. The bug fixes generally fall into three areas:
-potential crash bugs
-performance / scalability improvements
-improvements to Row-based replication
Some of the bugs being fixed are corner cases and unlikely to affect many users, but since the fixes were in place, it makes sense to include them in 5.1.28. With some assistance from Sun's performance team and the InnoDB team we were able to make a couple of fixes that improve performance on multi-core systems, which is good for our most advanced customers who are pushing the limits of scalability. And finally, our support team asked for a utility to make it easier for customers to see what's going on in row-based replication. Kudos to all the hard working Engineers who made these things happen.
Following on the September 5.1.28 release, I expect we will have an additional release candidate (5.1.29) in October, with a smaller number of remaining bug fixes. If all goes well, we'll declared our GA release in late November and move to our normal monthly and quarterly release cycle. And to be on the safe side, we'll make sure there are plenty of community binaries released so that everyone gets the benefits of any additional bugs that are found and fixed.
In the last few months there has been a lot of good input from folks in our community team, from the support organization, from MySQL founders, from Sun's software CTOs and others weighing in on our processes and helping us to ensure that we are following a good discipline. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this dialog.
In the end, I think we reached a good decision. If 5.1.26 was good quality, then I know that the subsequent release candidates will be even better. I'm also confident that our RC releases are higher quality than our current 5.0 GA release. We've been running 5.1. in production at MySQL for more than a year without problems. That's not an exhaustive test case by any means, we are also not the only ones running 5.1 in production. So by all means, I encourage you to test out the latest RC releases of 5.1 and put them through their paces. There's a lot of great new features in 5.1 and I believe it is already our highest quality release ever.
Marten Mickos, who runs the MySQL business inside of Sun, will be featured next week on Sun's "Innovation Insider" interactive web radio show. Marten will be talking about the upcoming Software Feedom Day (September 20), business & technology innovation, MySQL 5.1, Swedish drinking songs and more. Best of all, Marten will be available to answer the questions you post to the show. The show is live Thursday September 4 at 12:30 pm pacific time and will be available for replay.
I have challenged Marten that he should do the show in a penguin suit to show our commitment to all platforms, but since it's radio, it may be hard to tell...
On my InfoWorld blog I've posted an interview with Olli Toivainen, Nokia's director of product management. He's one of the unsung heroes behind the N Series of Linux-based Internet Tablets. Although I couldn't get him to make any new announcements of future products, he does give quite a bit of good info around the N810 Internet tablet, which I think is one of the coolest devices out there.
For those interested in music, I've also posted an interview with Joe Trohman from Fall Out Boy over at www.guitarvibe.com . Oddly enough, he didn't have much to say about Internet tablets, open source or Linux. But he sure had a lot to say about guitars!
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.
There are two recent updates on the MySQL storage engine front worth looking into. Paul McCullagh over at PrimeBase has updated their BLOB Streaming engine MyBS. (Ok, some people like the name, others don't. I suggest going for something more serious sounding.) The engine itself is pretty cool. It'a not really a general purpose engine, but the idea is to be able to store BLOBS of any size and stream them directly into and out of the database. Ideally, any engine could use the BLOB repository and streaming API. Paul got a good reaction at his MySQL Camp presentation in New York a few weeks back and is eager to get feedback. One concern: will the limitation of 4 Zettabytes be enough? ;-)
Jim Starkey and his team have also put out a new updated Alpha release of the Falcon engine. This is still early stage, but worth trying out if you plan on deploying modern multi-core hardware with lots of memory. For those who don't know, Jim is one of the pioneers in database technology and he invented BLOBs and MVCC some years back. There are some pretty cool innovations in Falcon for minimizing lock contention which should provide very scalable performance for web applications in particular. Falcon will be part of the MySQL 6.0 release available in 2008. There's a series of technical articles Robin Schumacher has written on "Understanding Falcon" Part 1, 2, 3.
Cool to see so much innovation happening in and around MySQL.
I finally got around to installing a SlimDevices SqueezeBox at home. It was a gift from my wife some months back, but the idea of wrestling with our in-wall cabinetry to hookup the audio cables and get my MP3 collection onto the living room stereo put me off for a long time. But I was in a cleaning mood this weekend and wanted to get rid of a bunch of boxes, books, and other clutter, so I figured this was as good a time as any. The installation was fairly simple, as long as you know how to convert a WEP key into hex.
All tolled it took about 15 minutes, including messing with the cabinets while balancing a receiver from it's cables. I didn't even have to reboot anything. Now I've got living room stereo access to all my MP3 songs from my desktop as well as Internet Radio, Pandora and the Squeezenetwork. It also supports most other unprotected audio formats including WMA, FLAC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis and WAV files, though I'm not sure why anyone would use WAV files anymore. For those curious, my music choices are rather out of date. I'm currently listening to a lot of Los Lobos, Hugh Cornwell (ex-Stranglers front man), Pink Floyd and legendary sixties garage rockers The Remains.
While Squeezebox is not the only way to get your MP3's onto a home stereo (I could have just plugged in my iPod), it works well, it's got a good display and the sound is excellent.
One interesting element of the SqueezeBox is that the SlimServer software is all open source. As the configuration info shows, SlimServer is running MySQL 5.0.22 and Perl 5.8.8.
If you're so inclined you can download the software for Windows, Mac, Linux, and check it out before buying a SqueezeBox. The software has been localized into multiple languages and there's a healthy community that's sprung up providing various plug-ins, skins, mods and development tools.
Again, this post is slightly off topic since I'm on vacation, but I wanted to point out a source for good freeware utilities for Windows. I was looking for a good Windows outliner program and not having much luck and my Java Flex guru buddy Bruce Eckel pointed this site out to me. If you're looking for a bit torrent client, a photo organizer, HTML editor, registry editor or any of a few dozen other items, this site will spare you the tedious research. The recommended outliner, Keynote, is available under an open source license, but it's no longer in active development.
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