Today we made a change in the schedule of talks held in the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2010, swapping two talks. Change is:

• 12:15 CET - Giuseppe's 'Sharding for the Masses
• 14:25 CET - Geert's Connecting MySQL and Python (title also changed)

The printed booklets found at the conference will not reflect the change, but the printable schedule has already been updated.

Today we made a change in the schedule of talks held in the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2010, swapping two talks. Change is:

• 12:15 CET - Giuseppe's 'Sharding for the Masses
• 14:25 CET - Geert's Connecting MySQL and Python (title also changed)

The printed booklets found at the conference will not reflect the change, but the printable schedule has already been updated.

We’re continuing to see signs that the dominant GPL open source license may be fading from favor among commercial open source software players. The latest move away from the GPL comes from content management software vendor Alfresco, which is moving to the LGPL after originally releasing its code under the GPL three years ago. The reasoning for the shift, according to Alfresco CEO John Newton, is the company sees greater opportunity beyond being a software application, particularly given the emergence of the Content Management Interoperability Services standard. Alfresco won mostly praise for its move, and it does make sense given where open source is going these days.

I believe the emerging trend away …

Looking back at the short-term, it wasn’t long since MySQL was bought by Sun, and yesterday the deal with Oracle was finalized.

I want to take this time to thank everyone involved in MySQL and the surrounding community for their hard work, and express my wishes that you look forward to the future and what it might hold, I am sure it will be great.

I think that if done correctly, we as a community can benefit from these changes in the long run, so let’s look forward rather than backward.

On a sidenote, mysql.com is quite slow today, perhaps as a result of high load due to masses of people wanting to check out the news. However, sun.com has now been redirected to Oracle.com.

Turns out however that things such as the documentation is still missing, hopefully it will return soon. As an example for what I mean, take …

In light of the official Oracle acquisition of Sun, I dug out a presentation video I realize I never officially shared with either the MySQL or the Oracle community. It’s the presentation I did at the 2008 Oracle Open World conference called, “So, you want to be an Oracle ACE?” and is a good resource for anyone who wants to contribute to anything — not just Oracle or MySQL, though certainly it’s based on my experiences with contributing to MySQL.

Oracle has lots of resources for the community. While I have joked about Oracle calling its conference “Open World”, I have also experience it, and the Oracle community first-hand and second-hand — through professional contacts such as my colleagues at Pythian who work on Oracle databases, and also through personal contacts such as my mother who has been to a few Oracle conferences herself.

…

February and March as busy months for Community events.  There's MySQL University, Fosdem, the Seattle MySQL Meetup & Confoo.ca. Here are the details:

• February 4th - I'll be presenting a talk via MySQL University on Optimizing Queries with Explain.  This talk will be about learning to read the output from MySQL's EXPLAIN command, and optimizing some example queries from the IMDB dataset.  At 5.7G in InnoDB tables imported before any secondary key indexes IMDB is one of my new favorite example databases.  It's about the right size on most desktop PCs that you can measure the difference between a query that's optimized and one that's not.  All material comes courtesy of a new …

Topics for this podcast:

*Open source in consumer devices
*VMware-Zimbra deal highlights open source, cloud
*A capitalist’s guide to open source licensing
*Latest on Oracle-Sun-MySQL, M&A implications

iTunes or direct download (24:48, 5.7 MB)

After a nice long vacation, it's time to unveil our destinations for public classes in 2010.  We are now offering a course for Developers as well as DBAs.  The dates are:

• Seattle 16 February
• San Francisco 18-19 February
• Boston 22-23 February
• New York City 25-26 February
• Montréal …

The tracks of this year's "MySQL & Friends" Developer Room at FOSDEM 2010 have now been scheduled - please check the Wiki page for details on the talks as well as some background information about the speakers. This info should soon be available via the FOSDEM conference system as well. We had some last-minute changes and we actually managed to schedule two more talks due to a small glitch in the initial calculation. The topics look very interesting, we hope that we can provide some valuable information for developers, users as well as MySQL DBAs!

One of our speakers (Kris Buytaert) suggested to arrange a joint dinner for Saturday evening, which is indeed a good idea! Thankfully he also volunteered for coordinating it - thanks in advance! …

Regular visitors to the 451 CAOS Theory blog will be well aware of The 451 Group’s CAOS (Commercial Adoption of Open Source) research service and our CAOS long-form reports.

They are probably less aware of the open source coverage that The 451 Group provides on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis, however, and I thought it would be worthwhile to provide some examples of The 451 Group’s ongoing open source coverage by highlighting a few recent reports.

The company’s core services are 451 Market Insight Service, which delivers daily insight into emerging enterprise IT markets, and 451 TechDealmaker, a forward-looking weekly …