There has been a significant increase in interest in the Memcached, the open source distributed memory object-caching system, in recent months, as a number of vendors look to exploit its popularity in Web 2.0 and social networking environments.

Like Hadoop, which has become the focus of a number of commercial plays, it would appear that the time is right for commercialization of Memcached. But what is it, here did it come from, and what are the chances for vendors to rake in serious cash? Here are the details.

What is it?
Pronounced mem-cash-dee, Memcached was originally created by Danga Interactive (the developer of LiveJournal, which was acquired by Six Apart in 2005) to speed up the performance of dynamic Web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached has become an industry standard for improving the performance of dynamic websites.

The code is available from the …

Release models make a huge difference in the properties of the software delivered. I believe there is no single "ideal" model; what to choose depends on the code base, the group/community creating the code, the users/customers, the technology available (languages, CI tools, others)... What works for Hudson does not work for GlassFish nor for Solaris.

Yahoo opens up Hadoop distribution. Microsoft and Novell claim customer wins. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

The elephant in the room
Plenty of news emerged form the Hadoop Summit this week, including Cloudera announced support for Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and introduced Sqoop, open source tool for importing databases into Hadoop, while Yahoo! Released! The! Yahoo! Distribution! Of! Hadoop! opening up its Hadoop developments to the wider community. As Savio Rodrigues noted, there has been a surge in the number of contributors for the Hadoop project in the last year.

Best of the rest
…

ScienceLogic embeds MySQL in its EM7 network management appliances. An installation of EM7 can perform over half a billion database queries daily, storing massive amounts of data for both real-time and trended performance reporting.

Michael McFadden, senior software architect with ScienceLogic, will discuss all this in an upcoming MySQL webinar.

ScienceLogic embeds MySQL in its EM7 network management appliances. An installation of EM7 can perform over half a billion database queries daily, storing massive amounts of data for both real-time and trended performance reporting.

Michael McFadden, senior software architect with ScienceLogic, will discuss all this in an upcoming MySQL webinar.

ScienceLogic embeds MySQL in its EM7 network management appliances. An installation of EM7 can perform over half a billion database queries daily, storing massive amounts of data for both real-time and trended performance reporting.

Michael McFadden, senior software architect with ScienceLogic, will discuss all this in an upcoming MySQL webinar.

Cloudera lands funding. SourceForge acquires Ohloh. Novell reports Linux growth. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

Cloudera shows signs of progress
GigaOM reported that Cloudera raised $6m Series B funding from Accel and Greylock and is now looking beyond web applications to wider enterprise adoption of Hadoop. Cloudera also announced its first certification program for Hadoop.

Open source goes mainstream in the UK
There have been signs of change recently with regards to open source adoption in the UK, which has traditionally lagged behind the rest of Europe and the US. CBR Magazine provided an analysis of …

Following the launch of the Open Database Alliance a number of interesting reports were published that examined its role in establishing MariaDB as an alternative development branch for MySQL and as a vendor-neutral open source database collective.

I had a few questions myself, which Monty Widenius and Peter Zaitsev, CEO of Percona, were good enough to answer for me via email. They also agreed for the exchange to be published here. This is what they had to say:

Q: Monty has stated that the intention is to open up the Alliance to include other open source database projects - any indication of how this would be done given the diverse …

Open Database Alliance formed. Oracle buys Virtual Iron. AccesStream reaches version 1.0. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

I’ve just met a fork named Maria
MySQL founder Monty Widenius and Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev announced the launch of the Open Database Alliance - “a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.”

Continuent and Open Query quickly announced their membership, while Monty later …

On my last count, there are now 20+ Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA) signatories whose names appear on the master list and who are interested in contributing to MySQL. Only this week, three new members signed the SCA.

These 22+ signatories have all been added since mid-February when we launched the new, Sun-compliant SCA signing process. Before the end of 2009, if we proceed at this same rate, MySQL SCA signatories list should grow to about 70 to 90 contributors.

In the meantime, contributions from many of these contributors have already been accepted and integrated. (I had earlier pointed to Armin Schöffmann's contribution as a simple example of how all this works.)

Some people continue to …