Colin Charles Agenda

Just as a head’s up, I’ll be at Software Freedom Day 2007, not in Melbourne, but in Beijing! Its on Saturday, September 15, 2007, and it only starts at 1PM (I presume this means I get to party on Friday night, to re-live some Beijing memories?).

I’m told a beginner-styled talk is best, so what kind of MySQL-related talk would you be after? Business model related? Do give me ideas (sooner, the better). Keep in mind, I’ll have to pass the message on within a good 15 minutes, with 5 minutes for questions…

Check out the program, and I do hope to see you soon, if you’re in Beijing (or if we cross paths – I’m on Dopplr now, so you can play a “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego” with Where in the World is Colin).

Technorati Tags: beijing china travel softwarefreedomday sfd07 sfd dopplr

Mike Kruckenberg, well-respected community member recently blogged about MySQL taking another step (away from open source, and I’d like to refute some of his worries. In fact, this is really more to drive away from what some within the community think is not kosher, i.e. change #5 in Kaj’s blog entry.

The sources are always available. Its just gone one step further, in that you need to use the Bitkeeper free client, and pull the correct revision, tags of which are always at http://mysql.bkbits.net/. From there, you are welcome to compile it yourself, and even make a binary distribution, all with fair ease thanks to the excellent build scripts. As MySQL’s CEO Marten Mickos has in a regular slide deck of his: people use the Community Server to save money and spend time, while people use the Enterprise Server to save time and spend money (ref. slide 14 [html][pdf]).

Mike says, “And I can only guess, but somewhere in the MySQL master plan there must be another blog post planned to ease folks along about closing off the enterprise source in Bitkeeper.” They say talk is cheap, so I’m not going to promise this will not ever happen in this lifetime, but I implore you to think about who makes up the MySQL development team — they are largely, very opinionated, open source types, whom will refuse to work on a code-base that they know isn’t open source. And going by Kaj’s change #1, which clearly states that there will be no new features applied to the current GA release, why are we really bothered about differing source trees?

The only real benefit in terms of sources and binaries is that if you’ve got Enterprise, you’re going to get your bug fixes every month, and a quarterly service pack to boot. If you’re on the Community tree, you’re just getting fixes once every 3 months, in a source release, that is sure to be built by the large and varied community MySQL have, for even more platforms than MySQL supports.

While Mike mentions the marketing message is currently stating that the Community edition is experimental and not ready for production, we all know that in technical reality, this is so untrue. MySQL maintains the same high quality assurance standards to any given tree, and I think this is why MySQL realised that putting community contributions into a current GA release was just not sensible — we all know that Jeremy’s famous SHOW PROFILE patch (the epitome of Community Contributions) introduced some server instability till 5.0.41. This is why the sensible decision has been made to push changes into the current development tree — to ensure high quality and standards are maintained in the current GA releases.

So let me reiterate: the Community server will never get unreliable with Community Contributions.

Note: Title has since changed… Hat tip to Marten :-)

Technorati Tags: mysql, community, enterprise, differentiation

I think anyone into databases, Linux and so on (i.e. the LAMP stack), will benefit from the High Scalability website. Heck, any web developer will. Its well tagged (say, you’re into mysql or memcached), has a lot of content, and links to other sites that it gets its summaries/information from. Useful resource for all those into scalability (not necessarily high performance).

Incidentally, I see information about bdb (in the forums), but where are all the reports about highly scaling sites running postgresql? It’d be interesting to read, and catalogue, I think

Technorati Tags: scalability, resource, mysql

Not long ago I returned from Mobile Monday Melbourne, and this month I got to see Manny Christophidis from Streamezzo give a talk about what they do. Being my first Mobile Monday event, I had a great amount of fun and learning, and found out that many used MySQL in their work, sometimes passively without even knowing what database sat below them.

Surprised I was, to learn that this event had been going on for nearly two years. If you’re not in the mobile space, you tend to miss out on this not-very-well advertised event, I guess. Seeing as there are more mobile phones being sold these days than personal computers, I think this space is going to get even larger in time to come.

Back to Streamezzo. They make mobile clients, that are really lightweight (100kb Java, and about 200kb Symbian), that realistically serve as ad clients. As common sense would have it, they’ve found that putting ads at the application start and end seem to work the best (i.e. notice when fring is loading, it has a silly message saying “fring is loading…” – replace that with a targeted ad, Streamezzo says) and annoy the user the least.

Streamezzo’s server requires Java and can have either an Oracle or MySQL 4 (or greater) database. Back-end OS can be either Windows 2000 and up or Red Hat Linux.

Some of the more interesting things they’ve done is that they’ve re-skinned an entire mobile phone, and made the device home screen the actual portal. This ensures folk can pull down data based on the location (cell) they’re in. With all the modern rave about the online desktop, man, this sounds like an early version of the online mobile phone.

Applications they developed that caught my eye included:

• a promo for Nelly Furtado, which delivered rich media music (and video). One could preview songs from her latest album, buy the song, buy a ringtone, or preview video clips. These previews incidentally were controlled at the server (so they’re full-length songs in reality, but the server only pushes out say, 5s for a preview). The mashup with online chat seems to make this app pretty cool – if you’re a Nelly fan who got this app downloaded, you’re bound to want to chat to other Nelly fans
• a client for vpod.tv, which is the French version of YouTube. They speak video publishing for the masses, and they definitely use MySQL for their back-end as well

Sadly, Streamezzo’s stuff isn’t open source. They claim that with knowledge of XML, you should be able to create applications pretty quickly. Apparently it can set you back 0.75 Euro cents per active mobile client per month; this doesn’t include the minimum establishment fee as well. One might really be better off with Flash Lite (though I wonder how the free/OSS tools for creation of content fare).

In other quick news, omg.tv organise the event, and one of their specialities is Second Life, and more importantly, the Second Life Cable Network slcn.tv! I’ve got to give this Second Life thing a try, soon. Also, MTX Media develop a lot of primarily Symbian software, but also do Java based stuff and they’ve got some cool things that are out there – a targeted ad for Honda that gives users information about all available Honda’s, but what I found most useful is the Yellow Cab app – book a taxi, via the mobile web, without ever having to make a phone call! Coming to Melbourne in under-3 months, as its proven to work in Sydney. MTX back-ends are all MySQL Enterprise based, for what its worth.

Technorati Tags: mobile monday, mobile monday melbourne, mysql, streamezzo, mobile client, advertising, rich media applications, second life, mtx, java, symbian

While it would seem that using Mugshot is for core Linux geeks (it runs on Windows too, you know), I’ve not seen much adoption of the MySQL Mugshot Group, that was announced back in February. I’ve always enjoyed getting the Mugshot client running on my desktop informing me of new RSS feeds in Planet MySQL, so I can read new blog entries relatively quickly.

A new notification method has come upon us – its Twitter. When all is hunky dory, you get IMs or SMSes the moment a post is made from someone you’re following. So I give you the Twitter Planet MySQL Feed. Just add user “planetmysql” as a friend you’re following, make sure that notifications are turned on, and you’ll be notified whenever the Planet is pinged (which happens every 40 minutes once, I believe).

How is this possible? Largely thanks to rss2twitter. The interface is simple, and there are no controls, so I’m hoping it “just works”. The other option seems to be twitterfeed. It seems to require an OpenID login, plus a twitter login, and probably has a lot more controls and a blog to boot. Its the next obvious choice if rss2twitter fails me.

Update: I’ve started using twitterfeed. And in the first 23 hours or so, the Planet MySQL feed itself was broken, so no one got any updates. All is well now, it seems. Pinging once every hour, which is about right for Planet MySQL’s cron job.

Technorati Tags: mysql, twitter, planetmysql, planet mysql, mugshot, rss2twitter, twitterfeed

I was at MODM4 yesterday, and as always, great fun was had. One common recurring theme though, was getting MySQL to start automatically upon a Linux server’s restart, something which I would have thought just came pretty naturally to sys-admin types. Upon further probing, these systems were all generally CentOS or RHEL based, and it wasn’t just MySQL that gave them problems – it was anything they’d installed out of the stock packages (lighttpd was a popular Apache replacement, that suffered from the same fate).

While I didn’t recollect the exact part of the manual it was stored in, I was informing everyone to make use of the chkconfig tool. Its really as simple as making sure there exists a /etc/init.d/mysql (it must be executable – chmod +x), doing a chkconfig --add mysql and making sure that it starts up at the correct runlevels (typically 3, 4 and 5). A simple chkconfig --level 345 mysql on and you’re ready to rock. Repeat, rinse for lighttpd or anything else, that has a startup script, really.

And read the manual – section 2.4.16.2.2. Starting and Stopping MySQL Automatically. chkconfig‘s manual page is a little sparse, so consider some of the Red Hat Knowledgebase entries: How do I use chkconfig to enable a script for a service that accepts start, stop, and status options? and Why does an installed service, like ypbind, not show up in the chkconfig list, but I am able to start it manually? Kudos to Red Hat’s open KB as well…

Technorati Tags: chkconfig, rhel, centos, fedora, mysql