When participating recently in a sprint held at Google to document four free software projects, I thought about what might have prompted Google to invest in this effort. Their willingness to provide a hotel, work space, and food for some thirty participants, along with staff support all week long, demonstrates their commitment to nurturing open source.

Google is one of several companies for which I'll coin the term "closed core." The code on which they build their business and make their money is secret. (And given the enormous infrastructure it takes to provide a search service, opening the source code wouldn't do much to stimulate competition, as I point out in a posting on O'Reilly's radar blog). But they depend on a huge range of free software, ranging from Linux …

Multi-master database systems that span sites are an increasingly common requirement in business applications.  Yet the way such applications work in practice is not quite what you would think from accounts of NoSQL systems like Cassandra or SQL-based systems like Oracle RAC.  In this article I would like to introduce a versatile design pattern for multi-master SQL applications in which individual schemas are updated in a single location only but may have many copies elsewhere both locally as well as on other sites.  This pattern is known as a system of record architecture.  You can build it with off-the-shelf MySQL and master/slave replication.

Let's …

I'm about to take a week off from my new gig as COO at Zendesk and it got me reflecting on the company and my decision to join.  I stayed with MySQL through the Sun acquisition and left when Oracle acquired Sun.  Although I have a lot of respect for Oracle, it seemed to me the only interesting jobs would be those that report directly to Larry Ellison.  So I took some time off to travel, worked as an EIR at Scale Ventures for a few months and began thinking about what I wanted to do next.

I turned down offers from companies and investors to come in and "repeat the MySQL playbook" in Big Data or NoSQL or apps or whatever.  I think Open Source can be a fantastic …

This title is not nearly as snappy as Yeats' line from "The Second Coming," but it will have to do.  Conflict resolution has been a holy grail for us on Tungsten--we had people asking for it when MySQL was still MySQL AB, lo these many years ago.   Well, it's finally starting to happen after about a year of work.  

Let's start with a simple multi-master configuration.  To replicate bi-directionally between two masters, you typically run Tungsten replicator on each master with two replication services on each master.  The first local service reads the master log.  The second remote service is a slave of the other master.  It looks like the following picture:

…

My previous post focused on some of the problems of doing multi-tenant MySQL.

One of the reasons why I started hacking on Drizzle was that the multi-tenancy options for MySQL just weren’t very good (this is also the reason why I run my blog in a VM and not a shared hosting solution).

What you really want is to be able to give your users access to a virtual database server. What you don’t want is to be administering a separate database server for each of your users. What you want are CATALOGs.

A CATALOG is a collection of SCHEMAs (which have TABLEs in them). Each CATALOG is isolated from all the others. Once you connect to a catalog, that’s it. They are entirely separate units. There are no cross-catalog queries or CHANGE CATALOG commands. It is as if each catalog is its own database server.

Last month my colleague Giuseppe Maxia described how to operate Tungsten parallel replication. Since then we have been doing a good bit of benchmarking on both synthetic as well as real production loads. In this article I would like to follow up with some tips about how you can goose up parallel replication performance.  These apply to Tungsten Replicator 2.0.1, which you can find here. 

The first way to get good performance with Tungsten is to have the right workload. As explained in an earlier article on this blog, Tungsten parallel replication works by replicating …

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2010-12-22 through 2011-01-04:

• WS-C3560V2-XXXX-X, WS-C3750V2-XXXX-X Series RPS cover and rare power reset – Replacement Recommended
  The RPS cover for wall-mount of the Acc Kits in the BOM was not correct; it should be 22P instead of 14P. The issue is a safety issue for those who choose to wall-mount the RPS. It's found on WK48P/NZ48P that the magjack connector's shielding were short to the test via 2.5v to ground. Adding capton tape underneath Belfuse/Pulse connector to avoid the short via ECO as a short term solution will respin PWB to correct issue.
• WordPress › 3.0.4 Important Security Update
  Time to update!
• …

Series

What are the chances for a free software cloud?

• Resolving the contradictions between web services, clouds, and open source
• Defining clouds, web services, and other remote computing
• Why clouds and web services will continue to take over computing
• Why web services should be released as free …

Series

What are the chances for a free software cloud?

• Resolving the contradictions between web services, clouds, and open source
• Defining clouds, web services, and other remote computing
• Why clouds and web services will continue to take over computing
• Why web services should be released as free software (12/20)
• Reaching the pinnacle: truly open web services and clouds (12/22)
…

I only recently found out about GigaOm's upcoming Net:Work conference.  It's held December 9 at UCSF Mission Bay conference center.  While the name of the conference is a bit ambiguous, the actual area of focus is very clear: how will we collaborate in the 21st century?  

The impact of smartphones, tablet computing, social networks, Software-as-a-Service and Cloud computing is just starting.  As a result, I think there are tremendous opportunities for startup companies to disrupt existing markets with more modern, lightweight applications that foster collaboration inside the company as well as with partners, vendors, consultants and customers.  

…