As the dog days of summer set in and temperatures rise, this year’s O’Reilly OSCON conference in Portland, OR offered the open source community a brief respite from the heat. However, if you’re thinking the event lacked sizzle, think again. The energy, the discussions and the opportunities to collaborate, plus the chance to learn from/ interact with customers and potential customers, made OSCON one of the highlights of July.

While I’ve attended previous OSCON conferences while at MySQL AB, this was the first time I’ve attended as the CEO of SkySQL. My new role provided a different perspective, as well as new kinds of opportunities to interact with the open source community. There were plenty of terrific, formal presentations and Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, however, those from MySQL, MariaDB and Drizzle were especially noteworthy and informative. Here were a few high points:

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Today at OSCON, SkySQL will introduce the SkySQL™ Recovery Manager.  Powered by Zmanda, the SkySQL™ Recovery Manager is the most advanced backup and recovery solution for the MySQL® database.  SkySQL’s solution makes life easier for any database administrator in need of a robust, yet flexible and easy to use backup and recovery manager.

With SkysQL Recovery Manager, you will be able to:

• Perform flexible backups
• Provide continuous data protection for you MySQL databases
• Backup live MySQL databases without affecting users or applications
• Perform one-click point-in-time recovery
• Centralize global backup management
• Perform fast backups of MySQL databases running in Amazon EC2®
• Maximize data security
• Monitor backup and recovery functions with automated alerts and reports
• Rapidly deploy your backup and recovery …

The primary objective of this release was to radically improve performance for subqueries, as well as for joins and single-table queries over large data sets. The MariaDB 5.3 release is based on MariaDB 5.2 (and therefor, MariaDB 5.1 & MySQL 5.1).

Noteworthy improvements in this release include:

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Today, SkySQL announced a partnership with Yoshinori Matsunobu, an Oracle ACE Director and the creator of the newly announced MySQL Master High Availability Manager and Tools (MySQL MHA) for automating MySQL master failover. With this partnership, SkySQL will be the first MySQL database commercial services company to provide technical support, professional services, and training, for MySQL MHA.

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Today, more and more proprietary software vendors are choosing to go Open Source. Doing this enables them to leverage the community benefits of Open Source, shorten the sales cycle, and gain a competitive advantage over other proprietary products.

However, for those firms considering a switch to Open Source, there are some hard decisions to make with regard to their product architecture. Should they provide only a single Open Source product, and earn revenue from add-on services like support and consulting (RedHat)? Or should they adopt the Open Core model, offering their product under both Open Source and proprietary licenses (MySQL)? Or …

For Open Source projects whose software architecture allows it, inviting developers to extend the core product through add-on modules and plug-ins is a great way to raise interest and awareness and thus kickstart or foster an adoption/contribution cycle. In such a setting, Open Source vendors and their business partners should consider building and maintaining an online marketplace or exchange for add-ons, which will serve as a highly effective distribution and sales channel.

Distribution and Sales Channel

Such a modules marketplace allows business partners and community developers to showcase their work, maximize its visibility and earn money by selling custom modules to end-users.

Typically, you’d find all or some of the following offerings in …

Congratulations to Khailee for getting GroupsMore sold to Groupon (in a record five months since its inception!). He tells me they’re now Groupon Malaysia and Joel (his partner, co-founder of YouthSays) is going to be CEO of Groupon Malaysia. A lot of people instantly said that since Groupon is now in Malaysia, all the other deal sites can go the way of the dodo.

I don’t think so. For a site that does group purchases to be successful, people need to know it exists. Savvy Malaysians have always been into group purchases because a) our currency generally sucks, b) its difficult to get cool stuff shipped to Malaysia. Of course the currency is improving now, and there are virtual postboxes that ship stuff to Malaysia for a small fee.

But I digress. Group purchasing has been happening for years, heck over a decade. I remember …

For a few years, I've tried to recap here some events I've found notable over the past year and offering some guesses on what might be ahead of us. I'm somewhat late on these things this year, due to being busy with other stuff, but I didn't want to break the tradition, no matter how silly my wrong guesses might seem later. And again, others have covered generals, so I'll try to focus on specifics, in particular as they relate to what I do. For a look at what we achieved for Habbo, see my recap post on the Sulake blog.

This time last year Oracle still had not successfully completed the Sun acquisition due to some EC silliness, but that finally happened over the 2010. It seems to be playing about how I expected it to - …

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2010-12-22 through 2011-01-04:

• WS-C3560V2-XXXX-X, WS-C3750V2-XXXX-X Series RPS cover and rare power reset – Replacement Recommended
  The RPS cover for wall-mount of the Acc Kits in the BOM was not correct; it should be 22P instead of 14P. The issue is a safety issue for those who choose to wall-mount the RPS. It's found on WK48P/NZ48P that the magjack connector's shielding were short to the test via 2.5v to ground. Adding capton tape underneath Belfuse/Pulse connector to avoid the short via ECO as a short term solution will respin PWB to correct issue.
• WordPress › 3.0.4 Important Security Update
  Time to update!
• …

Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a way of developing computer software applications with less effort than the traditional means.

RAD tools focus on providing code generation and automated testing capabilities with the use of convention over configuration to provide a streamlined workflow to create applications.

Even with the most advanced and easiest to use RAD tools, there are times which the traditional enterprise and the business software development vendors which are having their own implementations and in-house built frameworks are continuously refusing to adopt them.

Most of the misconceptions on the RAD are based on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) which has been created around the internal complexity of the RAD tools.

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