For very personal reasons that don’t belong in this article, I decided a few weeks ago that it’s time for me to move on. The year and a half that I worked for Pythian have been a wonderful experience, and this is article is my tribute to this great company.

The MySQL Team

Being able to work side by side with two MySQL experts like Sheeri Cabral and Augusto Bott has been a great experience. I have learned a lot, not only about MySQL, but also about what a great DBA should be like. Both of them are recognized MySQL Community members and regular speakers at the MySQL Users Conference and other events. Sheeri has been named MySQL Community Member of the Year twice in a row. Both are a guarantee of excellent service.

My Predictions For Pythian

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The two predominant forms of open source licenses are BSD and GPL. PostgreSQL is licensed under the BSD license , while MySQL is licensed under GPL . While the details are arcane, the business impact is significant, and that is what this post addresses.

The BSD (or BSD-style) License: This license basically says: ‘This code is provided as is, do what you want with it, and include this copyright in your resulting product.’

The GPL License: This license, also known as the copyleft license, essentially says: ‘This is free and distributed as source code, and any addition or extension must also be distributed under these exact terms.’

BSD essentially says I prefer open source code, so I’m making my source code open and freely available, but what …

Amazon’s SimpleDB isn’t a relational database, but it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability. Amazon’s recently announced Relational Database Services (RDS) is a relational database, but it doesn’t provide elastic scalability or high-availability. If you are deploying enterprise applications on the cloud (including Amazon Web Services), you might want to look at ScaleDB because it is a relational database and it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability.

Amazon describes SimpleDB by comparing it to a clustered database:

"A traditional, clustered relational database requires a sizable upfront capital outlay, is complex to design, and often requires extensive and repetitive database administration. Amazon SimpleDB is dramatically simpler, requiring no schema, automatically indexing your data and providing a simple API for storage and access. This approach eliminates the administrative burden of …

Amazon’s SimpleDB isn’t a relational database, but it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability. Amazon’s recently announced Relational Database Services (RDS) is a relational database, but it doesn’t provide elastic scalability or high-availability. If you are deploying enterprise applications on the cloud (including Amazon Web Services), you might want to look at ScaleDB because it is a relational database and it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability.

Amazon describes SimpleDB by comparing it to a clustered database:

"A traditional, clustered relational database requires a sizable upfront capital outlay, is complex to design, and often requires extensive and repetitive database administration. Amazon SimpleDB is dramatically simpler, requiring no schema, automatically indexing your data and providing a simple API for storage and access. This approach eliminates the administrative burden of …

1. Toiling in the Data Mines -- Tom Armitage describes the process that Berg calls "material exploration". Programmers very rarely talk about what their work feels like to do, and that's a shame. Material explorations are something I've really only done since I've joined BERG, and both times have felt very similar - in that they were very, very different to writing production code for an understood product. They demand code to be used as a sculpting tool, rather than as an engineering material, and I wanted to explain the knock-on effects of that: not just in terms of what I do, and the kind of code that's appropriate for that, but also in terms of how I feel as I work on these explorations. Even if the section on the code itself feels foreign, I hope that the explanation of what it …

I can think of no better analogy than that of a multi leg race. You know, the races where one sprinter runs as fast as they can, before passing the baton to the next sprinter.

First it was Broadbase.
Second it was LucidEra.
Third it was Eigenbase / LucidEra / SQLstream (joint development w/ Eigenbase).

Having purchased commercial rights from LucidEra it’s ours to run with now, alongside Eigenbase and SQLstream.

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After finishing my post about Monty Widenius's views on the Oracle acquisition of MySQL via Sun, I read that Richard Stallman (RMS) had published an open letter on the topic.

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MySQL's ex-CEO Marten Mickos and MySQL co-founder Michael "Monty" Widenius recently released open letters to the EU. Marten supports the Oracle acquisition of MySQL, as part of the Sun deal. Monty urges the EU to block MySQL from being controlled by Oracle.

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Rome is a great city and it will host a bunch of great people (including me ) at November 12-13. This is when the second IKS Project workshop will take place. The goal of this workshop is to start working on an Open Source software stack that allows other Open Source projects and software vendors to leverage semantic search technologies.

IKS is an EU-funded project with an overall budget of 8.5 million Euros. The first workshop back in May saw two dozen of bright Open Source CMS minds discussing a semantic stack in general. This time, it will also make sense for non-CMS-related Open Source projects and vendors to join.

There will be interesting presentations from some key figures at the second workshop in Rome, such as Peter Mika of Yahoo! Research talking about “The Role of …

When I was younger and had lots of free time, I used to do video editing as a hobby. At that time I developed a rule that is true for many projects in general (it was also true for writing a book some years later). The rule is: When you think you are 90% done, you are only 50% done. With video-editing, this meant that when the video was more or less ready, you are still 50% away from the final goal of actually having a master copy on tape. The latter 50% would be spent on checking ending credits, watching through the video a couple of times, and in those time, rendering even simplest of effects. Using a Windows PC for video editing was in those times a shaky effort in itself, so even when mastering you had to sit there and watch through the whole tape to make sure there were no glitches.

Producing a MariaDB release has been a similar process. In our company meeting in August we were discussing "final steps" to produce a final Beta, …