OK, you’ve released your open source product and built a huge userbase. Now your shareholders/investors are pressing you to monetize that userbase. How do you do it? There are many ways to monetize open source. For simplicity, let’s segment the revenue sources according to who is paying:

Users :
Your users probably downloaded your product for free. Some are willing to pay for certified/approved distributions, maintenance, updates, support and more. Because open source turns your product and services into commodities, you will need to leverage your brand, and the expertise that it embodies, to maintain premium pricing.

Another good revenue source is certified education. If you’ve built a large userbase, businesses clearly see value in your product. As a result, employees and job-seekers will enhance their personal value and marketability if they are certified experts with your product. Assemble copyrighted educational …

Baron got a great amount of response from his 50 things to know before migrating Oracle to MySQL. I’m glad I invited him as a fellow MySQL colleague to my presentation to the Federal Government on Best Practices for Migrating to MySQL from Oracle and SQL Server for his inspiration.

Oracle will always be a more featured product then MySQL. There are however features that MySQL has that Oracle does not. While I’ve got a draft of a list of my own, I have several hundred incomplete drafts.

One of these features I was able to demonstrate to a client is the ability to have multiple VALUES clauses for a single INSERT statement. For example.

INSERT INTO t1(c1) VALUES (1), (2), (3), (4), (5);

…

Recently I came across another configuration option I’d not heard of before. I profess to not know them all, however I do know when I find something unusual. If you are a beginner DBA, learn what is normal and expected, and identify what is out of the normal, investigate, research and question if necessary.

I gave away a MySQL Administrator’s Book based on seeing a configuration with safe-show-database, an option I’d not seen before, and then requesting people giving basic configuration options in that situation.

The latest is max_tmp_tables. So, what does the manual say for this option. I quote:

The maximum number of temporary tables a client can keep open at the same …

I have been working recently with Matt Yonkovit to get Waffle Grid cloud enabled with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

An initial version of Waffle Grid Cream - Version 0.5 release is now available.

We have elected to create one AMI for now, that is ready to be configured as either a MySQL Server, a memcached server, or as in the following example both. For this first version, we have also not configured MySQL or memcache, but rather provide a virgin Waffle Grid ready server for developers to experiment and benchmark with.

Future releases will include custom AMI’s and the automated ability to register new memcached servers with the Waffle Grid enabled MySQL server.

Instance Creation

We assume you have created an …

In a prior blog post , I explained how the "open source + paid support " business model only works for software products that address extremely large markets. However, even those large market products rely upon a rich collection of niche market products that combine to deliver solutions.

As the book Crossing the Chasm explains, every technology product must make the move from its early adopter or hobbyist roots to a mainstream application. The hobbyists are willing to accept tinkering with the product to make it work, but the much larger mainstream market wants to buy proven solutions .

As John Donne once said, "no man is an island." Similarly, no software application is an island; each one relies on an orchestra of tools, applications and services necessary to …

In a prior blog post , I explained how the "open source + paid support " business model only works for software products that address extremely large markets. However, even those large market products rely upon a rich collection of niche market products that combine to deliver solutions.

As the book Crossing the Chasm explains, every technology product must make the move from its early adopter or hobbyist roots to a mainstream application. The hobbyists are willing to accept tinkering with the product to make it work, but the much larger mainstream market wants to buy proven solutions .

As John Donne once said, "no man is an island." Similarly, no software application is an island; each one relies on an orchestra of tools, applications and services necessary to …

I discovered while compiling Wafflegrid today that by default, the Ubuntu binaries for memcached are not-multithreaded.

Following the installation of memcached from apt-get and libmemcached I ran memslap for:

$ memslap -s localhost
    Threads connecting to servers 1
    Took 1.633 seconds to load data

$ memstat -s localhost
Listing 1 Server

Server: localhost (11211)
     pid: 23868
     uptime: 54
     time: 1244575816
     version: 1.2.2
     pointer_size: 32
     rusage_user: 0.90000
     rusage_system: 0.120000
     curr_items: 10000
     total_items: 10000
     bytes: 5430000
     curr_connections: 1
     total_connections: 3
     connection_structures: 2
     cmd_get: 0
     cmd_set: 10000
     get_hits: 0
     get_misses: 0 …

We know that the open source + paid support business model works for software products that have extremely large numbers of users, but does it scale to products with medium or small numbers of users?

Software is often described as a stack (see the simplified version below).

Vertical Applications [Installed base = small]
————————–
Middleware (e.g. Database) [Installed base of MySQL = 12 Million]
————————–
Operating System [Installed base of Windows = 1Billion+]

Companies in the operating system layer typically have large numbers of users with a small license fee per user. This dynamic makes it relatively painless for a company to forgo a small license fee in exchange for a larger userbase, and then make money on support. For example, an open source company might forgo the $100 license fee, but charge $15 a seat for support. With large numbers of users, the …

Seem’s the year Sun had for improving MySQL, and with an entire new 5.4 branch the development team could not fix the autoconf and compile dependencies that has been in MySQL for all the years I’ve been compiling MySQL. Drizzle has got it right, thanks to the great work of Monty Taylor.

I’m working on the Wafflegrid AWS EC2 AMI’s for Matt Yonkovit and while compiling 5.1 was straight forward under Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid, compiling 5.4 was more complicated.

For MySQL 5.1 I needed only to do the following:

apt-get install -y build-essential
apt-get install libncurses5-dev
./configure
make
make install

For MySQL 5.4, I …

For the fourth time in a row, I will be speaking at FrOSCon, one of the most charming open source events in Europe.
Hosted in the bright environment of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, this event will get you hooked from the beginning. The organization is done by volunteers, who have always done an amazing job, with even better results than more expensive and famous conferences.
This year, there will be some more action than ever before. In addition to the main event, the organizers have given away a few developers rooms, to let some projects build their own event within the main one. There will be a Java subconference, and, closer to my interests, the European edition of the OpenSQLCamp 2009, which applies to all open …