About a month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun to try to stop the competitive impact of ZFS on their business.

I can understand why they're upset - when Linux first came on the scene in Sun's core market, there were some here who responded the same way, asking "who can we sue?" But seeing the future, we didn't file an injunction to stop competition - instead, we joined the free software community and innovated.

One of the ways we innovated was to create a magical file system called ZFS - which enables expensive, proprietary storage to be replaced with commodity disks and general purpose servers. Customers save a ton of money - and administrators save a ton of time. The economic impact is staggering - and understandably threatening to Net App and other proprietary companies. As is all free innovation, at some level. …

MySQL has had this Enterprise Monitor around for a while, but I’ve not had the chance to try it. Well, all this changed briefly in July, when I was doing my APAC tour, and folk wanted to see Enterprise Monitor at work. Back then, I showed them some canned screenshots, and in Singapore, Kim Seong (famous on #mysql) from our partners Global Link, had some kind of special login, so they demoed it. It wasn’t until this week that I actually tried it (besides, it wasn’t until the UC-J that it was re-launched with new features), and found some time to play with it. And I was blown away.

An excessive table scan, you say?

With new …

Its exciting to see Zimbra being purchased for USD$350 million, by Yahoo!. Exciting because its a great product, exciting because I use it daily, and I guess Satish & team (of over 100 employees) deserve a big pat on the back. The other exciting thing to note is that its got MySQL in its core, and if they’re pushing it out farther and wider now thanks to the Yahoo! purchase, all the better.

There are a few things that are unclear, though, even from their FAQ:

• They mention commitment to Zimbra 5, but I’m still waiting for 4.5.7 :P (My Series 60 phone still …

I am a conference junkie. I love attending them, organizing them, speaking at them, planning to attend them, seeing my friends at conferences, making friends with the nice (but often stressed) people who run conferences and so on. I even like eating the (often bad) food - kvetching about it builds a sense of camaraderie with the other participants.

Given how much time and money I spend on conferences already, it might be hard for you to be able to get more money directly out of me. However, here is one small tip on a way that you might be able to do this.

When you send me email about upcoming events, send me links to useful feed as well. Many of you are technologists who run technology conferences for other technologists. For Zarquon’s sake, use the common pieces of technology that many of us use.

What would such feeds look like? Well, to answer my own rhetorical question …
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Spammers continue to find new ways to do their business and new ways to cause frustration for those of us who administer software that fosters small, open communities. These communities are fragile and grow up in a delicate environment. The environment needs to remain open: self-registration, the ability to post content, and the option of remaining anonymous is the key to success. Unfortunately, it is also a ripe environment for spammers to abuse.

Spammers have now discovered that bugzilla is one of those environments. For those who don’t know, bugzilla is one of the most common open source bug tracking tools. It is used by many open source projects to allow the community to assist in reporting bugs on and enhancement ideas for each project. The original version of Bugzilla was first created at Netscape in the mid-nineties (back when I was working at Netscape). It was rewritten in …

I’ve been a big supporter of Zimbra, because I think they’re one of the few projects/companies that get email/calendering/a groupware solution, right. Sure, I don’t necessarily like the model where they cripple the open source version in terms of say, backups (but this I guess will be fixed when MySQL supports online backups natively). No AdSense zimlet? Its easy enough to write one (with spare time).

What’s annoyed me of late with Zimbra, is its lack of ability to work with my Nokia E61i. Its a known problem (since February this year?), as it also affected the E61 (and probably other Series 60 phones, when you’re trying to access the Zimbra server over IMAP). You get the certificate being displayed, you get the headers, and when you try to open any email bodies, it just stops working.

The …

Some say Sun is as cool as OSCon (if not cooler) because, among most companies that support OSCon, only Sun can produce truly underground notes on OSCon.

David Van Couvering reviews Mike Olson's comments about his keynote at OSCon and pontificates about whether the value of Open Source could be limited to the collaboration it fosters. David aptly notes that

Open source and an open community gives you the assurance that the technology you are depending on is not going to be discontinued or put into "maintenance mode," it won't be acquired by someone who you would rather not do business with, and it won't be used as leverage against you to extract money or modify your behavior.

By way of further review, David contrasts MySQL as an Open Source project to …

After several months I have again spent a little work in the MySQL Index Analyzer I first published back in August of 2006.

I added a feature that will find duplicate columns inside an index, caused by the internal appending of the InnoDb primary key columns to each secondary index.

To get the code and read more about the new feature, including an example, go to the MySQL Index Analyzer Blog.

I just received word that my proposal (which was to present my Age of Literate Machines presentation) for FrOSCon has been accepted.

I’m pretty excited - the event should be fun and it will give me a good chance to see friends (including a good number of my German MySQL colleagues)

MySQL’s latest advertising campaign (called “The 12 Days of Scaleout“) is getting a bit of a kicking in the MySQL blog space.

I am sure that this is slightly uncomfortable for the MySQL team, but at the same time the team is lucky that people who care about MySQL still take the time to explain what they don’t like.

Perhaps it would be a good time for them to go back and add some meat to the case studies?

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