After a long pause in the speaking game, I am back.

It's since April that I haven't been on stage, and it is now time to resume my public duties.

• I will speak at MySQL Connect in San Francisco, just at the start of Oracle Open World, with a talk on MySQL High Availability: Power and Usability. It is about the cool technology that is keeping me busy here at Continuent, which can make life really easy for DBAs. This talk will be a demo fest. If you are attending MySQL Connect, you should see it!
• A happy return for me. On October 27th I will talk about open source databases and the pleasures of command line operations at …

We’re delighted to share the news that our friends at MariaDB today announced the availability of MariaDB Galera Cluster!

We’ve been talking a good bit about MariaDB in the past few months and it’s great to see the MariaDB & Codership partnership result in today’s announcement.

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The term Open Source is not as old as you may think, and the concept actually predates the name. Initially the keyword was Free not Open, but Free is here in the sense of Freedom not in the sense "without cost", and this conflict in the English term "Free" was one of the big reasons that Free really wasn't a good word here. Which all in all doesn't mean that Free isn't still used to describe the Open Source movement, like in FSF (Free Software Foundation).

And Free as in Freedom, not Free as in "without cost", is an important distinction. What the deal was, in my interpretation at least but there are many different views here, was that the software should be available for use by anyone and for any purpose as long as they followed the rules. And the rules was there for a number of purposes, two important ones being:

• To ensure that the software in question remained free and open.
• To …

There are plenty of "Oracle-is-killing-MySQL" headlines in the tech world:

• Oracle Makes More Moves To Kill Open Source MySQL
• Oracle now destroying MySQL
• Is MySQL Slowly Turning Closed Source?

Is Oracle really consciously and willingly killing MySQL?

I don't think so.

Is Oracle damaging MySQL by taking the wrong steps? Probably so.

This is my personal opinion, and AFAIK there is no official statement from Oracle on this matter, but I think I can summarize the Oracle standpoint as follows:

• There is a strong and …

I feel a sense of pride when I think that I was involved in the development and maintenance of what was probably the first piece of software accepted into Debian which then had and still has direct up-stream support from Microsoft. The world is a better place for having Microsoft in it. The first operating system I ever ran on an 08086-based CPU was MS-DOS 2.x. I remember how thrilled I was when we got to see how my friend’s 80286 system ran BBS software that would cause a modem to dial a local system and display the application as if it were running on a local machine. Totally sweet.

When we were living at 6162 NE Middle in the nine-eight 292, we got an 80386 which ran Doom. Yeah, the original one, not the fancy new one with the double barrel shotgun, but it would probably run that one, too. It was also …

Ein auf Open Source spezialisierter deutscher Freelance-Journalist, Ludger Schmitz, hat in einem Blog-Eintrag auf Enterprise CIO Forum von IDG Deutschland seine tiefe Enttäuschung über Oracle und dessen Behandlung von MySQL zum Ausdruck gebracht. Anlass waren die Ergebnisse einer Anwenderbefragung (hier und hier), welche Matthew Aslett von der Abteilung Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) beim Marktanalysten …

The brief outage was due to a scheduled move of the servers to a separate rack and subnet dedicated to our work with the Center for Information Assurance & Cybersecurity (ciac) at the University of Washington Bothell (uwb), and a11y.com

I am currently exercising the new (to us) equipment and hope to winnow the less than awesome equipment over the next quarter. I spent the last six months finding the best in breed of the surplussed DL385 and DL380 chassis we (work) were going to have recycled. The team and I were able to find enough equipment to bring up one of each with eight and six gigs of memory, respectively. These will make excellent hypervisors for provisioning embedded instances of Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeDOS, etc.

When I initially configured this xen paravirt environment, I failed to plan for integration with libvirt, so I am now re-jiggering the software bridges so …

Over the past few weeks since joining SkySQL as CEO, I have been meeting with team members to learn more about each person's views on the company, our customers and the industry. The team has done an amazing job since this company of original MySQLers re-emerged onto the scene more than a year and a half ago. We now have over 300 customers globally with very high satisfaction on the quality of services provided. July has for me been all about understanding the unique company culture and heritage from MySQL, and how we as a team can capitalize on our strengths to solve the challenges that our customers face while increasing the attractiveness of the MySQL ecosystem and community.

…

This past week I attended OSCon, the annual conference for open source’s true believers. And there was a religious fervor in the air, particularly from the point of view of someone more accustomed to Oracle conferences.

And if open source is the religion, proprietary closed-source companies are the devil. That having been said, I was surprised how virtually all large companies were demonized. Even long-time defenders of open source like IBM were ignored at best. That didn’t prevent them from coming though, with Microsoft and HP in particular with high-profile sponsorships and PR offensives that didn’t seem to have much influence with the crowd.

The companies generating buzz were the small companies built around development of their own open source products. There are a surprising number of them out there, especially relating to multiple forks of a popular product like MySQL or …

It’s been released. Use this with NIST::NVD 1.00.00 and you will be able to perform immediate look-ups of CVE and CWE data given a CPE URN. For instance:

cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/git/f5/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3$ perl Makefile.PL ; make ; make test ; cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/git/f5/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3$ perl -MNIST::NVD::Query -MData::Dumper -e '
$q = NIST::NVD::Query->new(store    => q{SQLite3},database => q{t/data/nvdcve-2.0.db});
$cve_list = $q->cve_for_cpe( cpe => q{cpe:/a:microsoft:ie:7.0.5730.11} );
print Data::Dumper::Dumper { cve_list => $cve_list, first_cvss => $q->cve( cve_id => $cve_list->[0] )->{q{vuln:cvss}} }
'
$VAR1 = {
          'cve_list' => [
                          'CVE-2002-2435',
                          'CVE-2010-5071'
                        ],
          'first_cvss' => {
                            'cvss:base_metrics' => { …