We are pleased to announce that Open Query, Queensland-based provider of MySQL, MariaDB and related services which just celebrated its 11-th anniversary, has been acquired by Catalyst IT Australia.

Founded in New Zealand in 1997, Catalyst is an experienced and respected Open Source integrator.  Catalyst is looking forward to the opportunity to work with the current Open Query clients as well as with new prospects. Catalyst offers a broad suite of Enterprise services, including support and custom development for Drupal CMS, SilverStripe CMS, Moodle LMS, Samba and other software, as well as fully managed hosting on AWS and other platforms.

“Catalyst’s core values are very much aligned with those of Open Query, which is why we are particularly pleased with this outcome”, notes Arjen Lentz, Founder and Exec.Director of Open Query.

Catalyst IT Australia has offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

As I reported via Twitter late last week, we encountered an issue that got some of our mail delivery delayed by about a day and a half. I’ll explain more about what happened as I believe in openness on these matters, and also the experience has educational content for others.

Our mail server doesn’t have direct external interaction, it’s shielded by two relays that handle both the inbound MX and the outbound queue. This setup works remarkably well in terms of exposure to spam and other malicious activity. As previously discussed, it appears that it’s more difficult to make mail server infra more resilient without expending lots more time/effort and infrastructure expenditure. Just because of the way the common tools for mail delivery and imap are built, having two or more of each in a semi-active setup gets quite complex. Complexity is in itself a risk so it has to be considered in relation to the costs and risks of the …

It’s a busy summer at Pythian, with our continuing wave of speaking sessions at upcoming community and regional industry events.

Coming to a city near you, watch for Pythian presenting hot Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server database topics:

IN CANADA:

Oracle Technology Days – Montreal
August 9, 2011 – 8:30am – 1pm, Hilton Montreal Bonaventure

• 11:00 am – Join Marc Fielding for Mixed Workload Management for Oracle Exadata
• More Pythian Oracle Exadata resources
• View the Evite
• Register/Inscrire

Oracle Technology Days – Toronto
August 25, …

What: SMUG#9 – In-depth MySQL with Arjen Lentz

When: Monday, September 7, 2009 5:30 PM

Where: Please make sure to RSVP (even “Maybe”) so that we know how many are coming!
Sydney Mechanics School of Art
Level 3, 280 Pitt Street
Sydney
02 9262 7300

I’m very excited to announce a very special guest at this user group meeting!

Arjen Lentz is in town doing his Sydney training program 7-Sep to 9-Sep and kindly agreed to drop by and talk about something interesting in the MySQL world – …

Reanimating the Sydney MySQL User Group!

What: Sydney MySQL User Group meetup #7 - The Reboot

When: July 16, 2009 5:30 PM (please don’t forget to RSVP yes/no/maybe)

Where: Sydney, CBD - join the meetup for exact location.

We are back! After 3 years of being silent, SMUG (can I call it so? I know there are conflicts with other acronyms) resurrects the meetings.

The logistic of the meetup is the following:

• 5:30pm — the gathering starts and we have pizza and beers and talking …

What: Sydney Oracle Meetup #3 - Focus on E-Business Suite + Oracle/Sun deal
When: April 28, 2009 5:30 PM
Where: As usual - Sydney Mechanics School of Art
How: just register at the SOM website.

We have to limit the number of people to 40 this time so make sure you RSVP timely!

We are gathering at 5:30pm and technical goodies are starting at 6pm so use this time to catch up with other members. We should finish by 8:30pm including a beaks and some post follow up. The presentation schedule is a bit floating this time.

As usual, we should have some pizza and beverages facilitating seamless peer networking. ;-)

In addition to the main topic, we plan to have some overview of Oracle / Sun deal and share what everyone thinks about it + report from the …

Time for a dump of some lessons learnt from my blog posting “On Open Source and Open Competition in a not-so-Open World“.

Let me start by a recap of what the process looked from my point of view:

1. My close colleague gets his visa rejected. He is a seasoned Australia visitor, so I assumed (and still assume) he knew what he was doing.
2. We connect the dots between the rejection and an IM discussion from August 2008 (see comment #29 on my blog), related to competition and Sun employees being let into Australia. Due to the nature of how visa rejections work, I cannot prove this is the case (even with the additional …

Open Source is global in nature. You can develop a database in, say, Finland or Sweden, and become known in, say, Ukraine or the United States.

This would imply that Open Source knows no borders.

In practice, borders hamper Open Source work a lot. I have been familiar with the hassle involving MySQLers in Russia and the Ukraine trying to get Schengen (European Union) and US visas for meetings. And I have myself gone through a lot of hassle travelling to Russia and once even (out of my own stupidity and carelessness, though) been denied entry to India when I already was on Indira Gandhi airport in New Delhi.

But now, I’ve experienced what I had expected the least:

Several Sun Microsystems Inc employees, especially related to the Database Group, have been denied short stay business visas to Australia, over the last few months, …

I’d like to share some great news — The Pythian Group and Open Query have become partners!

Open Query is a leading provider of high-quality MySQL, PostgreSQL and related training in Australia and New Zealand. They offer consulting services too, and are also known for their MySQL Graph Storage Engine. Feel free to browse through Open Query web-site for more info.

Open Query was founded by Arjen Lentz, who was employee number 25 at MySQL AB. If you follow the MySQL community then I’m sure you already read Arjen’s blog.

Since you’re reading this …

Hej hej from Stockholm where I arrived about two weeks ago for a fun-filled two four six weeks of meetings and face-to-face contact with the MySQL Cluster developers. And the chance to check things out when it’s not 2°C and raining, all the time, as it was when I was here in November and December of 2005. (This week, it’s 12°C and kind of misty.)

The last five or six weeks have been pretty hectic, and this evening (it’s just after 10 PM local time as I write this) represents the first time in that span that I’ve actually had time that’s not been planned out for me in one way or another. At the end of April, I moved out of my place in Brisbane and stuffed all my gear into storage in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, where I rented a post office box that now constitutes my sole legal address for the duration.

That last sentence is actually …