“The question is not why use open source, but how to best use open source,” wrote Matt Asay earlier this week. It was a throwaway point but one that I think deserves more attention.

It occurred to me that “how” rather than “why” is the most significant question that open source vendors and projects should be answering right now as they try to encourage greater adoption of open source software.

There can’t be a CIO or IT director left on the planet that hasn’t either asked or been told why they should deploy open source software. They are either inclined towards believing the claims of theoretical benefits or they’re not. How many have asked or been told how they can take advantage of open source software?

Certainly those that are convinced or intrigued by the potential benefits will have gone on to explore …

It is interesting to read RedmondDeveloper News’s take on Oracle’s attitude to open source this morning, especially this paragraph quoting Monica Kumar, Oracle’s senior director for Linux and open source product marketing:

“”We haven’t seen our customers asking for open source databases,” she told me. “Not many customers are interested in looking into the code and mucking around with it, and making changes to it. All they care about is ‘give me the best support, give me the lowest price of entry’.” For that Kumar pointed to Oracle Express.”

It is difficult to disagree with the second part of Monica’s statement. Cost savings are routinely cited as the biggest driver for open source database adoption, while the lack of robust support is the biggest barrier to open source adoption.

Certainly these were the findings of our …

These three open-source databases, now in OpenSolaris SXDE 1/08, offer all the needed features for most of the applications out there.

"Three databases to run them all"...

... and of course, Sun offers solutions with commercial database vendors, like the Sun and Oracle's Enterprise Grid Solutions.

As many of you may have already heard, Sun officially announced their purchase of  MySQL today.  After the last few years with Oracle pushing Linux and commodity hardware, Sun has certainly taken the hit.  I guess this is their turn to hit back.

With MySQL 6.0 out, increasingly we find the full compliment of sophisticated database features in MySQL.  But a lot of the devil is in the details.  Where Oracle has had problems with the sheer size of the codebase, and addressing security vulnerabilities, and other bugs in a timely manner, MySQL has the problem of a mature codebase.  Some of these features are newly available, and if my experiences with replication are any indication, often have hidden gotchas and “features” which are not emphasized in the literature.

The next question on my mind is, how does Oracle’s purchase and now …

Gosh I really love that word “open”.  When I hear it, I just get all warm inside.  I’ve always liked that Oracle used the word in it’s big annual conference name.  And this year’s show is bigger than ever.  I heard a rumor that there were 50,000 people here this year.  With an ever increasing round of acquisitions, the exhibitor and user communities just keep growing.

As you can see from this photo, they’ve totally blocked off Howard Street.  The video billboard there is at the 3rd street end.  I managed to catch it showing a frame of an open world!

Behind the billboard are tents where the lunchtime cafeteria was, because all the other square footage is now taken by exhibitors big and small.

And wow, were there a lot of vendors.  Even MySQL AB was here, as I blogged about …

Incredible, but true.  It seems that MySQL AB will be exhibiting next week at Oracle Open World.  This of course isn’t the first time a competitor would advertise or exhibit on it’s rival’s home turf.  Still it certainly signals a changing landscape, and heats up the battle for market share.

Here’s a longer list of exhibitors at the conference.  I don’t see Enterprise DB there, but anything’s possible.  You will see RedHat as well as Suse, now owned by Novell, represented there as well.  Also if you make it to the conference, be sure to visit the Oracle pavilion section, where there are sure to be smaller booths for …

In Part II in this series, I talk about how these three databases compare in some particularly crucial areas.

For instance how do the optimizers of these different database engines behave, and why does that matter?  What type of indexes are available, particularly with respect to typical applications.  I then move on to datatypes available and which are missing.  You’ll find some surprises here.

Lastly the holy grail of any modern relational database, I discuss transactional support. Relevant concepts include ACID compliance, read-only versus insert and update activity, and so on.

Recently I had some trouble with the server where all of my websites are hosted.  Business site, various blogs, there is lots of stuff on there, not to mention backups of work, email, and all sorts of things I do not really want to lose.

I first noticed the trouble when I couldn’t login through the command line.  Strangely the websites were still running.  I called the hosting company, and after talking with them for a while, managed to login as root.  That was working.  But it was acting quite odd.  There were some errors in the /var/log/messages about ssh not being able to set uid 10003, the uid of my login, shull.  I pondered.  I thought.  I sat circumspect.

I investigated for a while, and called up 1 & 1 again.  I have a root server, but they’re not really supposed to support maintaining the machine itself.  Then I got to thinking, I could spend hours diagnosing …