Vyatta has rocked the networking world by developing the first commercially supported, open source router and firewall solution. Ambitions of changing the rules of the game of a huge industry, come with very critical data - which doubles in size every year! They also come with a very heterogeneous environment:  Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, and Ubuntu - well, as long as it is a Linux distro

Vyatta recognized the need for a formal backup solution to replace the homegrown backup scripts, and chose Amanda Enterprise. Amanda backs up terabytes of Vyatta’s data spread across web sites, e-mail server, source-code repository, databases, and user files. Here is the full story.

Roland Bouman and I will be doing a presentation together at T-Dose on October 25th:

Building Open Source BI solutions with Pentaho and MySQL

It’s a free conference, feel free to join us there for a chat and/or a drink!

Until then,
Matt

So… A few years back I spent a LOT of time with Oracle ETL and BI products. I learned them inside and out, gave some user conference presentations, wrote a bunch of blogs, even Alpha tested a version of Oracle Warehouse Builder. Then I found “Open Source BI” and I’ve been heading breakneck into the world of MySQL, Pentaho, … A choice I do NOT regret - my consultancy is busier than ever and I love the Open Source BI play.

However - I miss seeing some of the old Oracle peeps at Open World. This year, I even registered for my free ACE pass to OOW but didn’t make it because I started two new projects this week. What I realized this year, was that I’m WAY out of touch with what’s going on in the land of Big Red O. The words and products for BI whiz past me - they don’t even look anything like they did just a couple of years back.

I hope everyone had a good time at OOW this year! I don’t see a path back to the land of …

Some observations from the MySQL developer meeting READ MORE

I attended OpenSolaris Storage Summit last weekend.  There are lot of efforts going on to make OpenSolaris into a feature rich storage operating system.  Some of the projects that are relevant to backup are NDMP, Storage de-duplication, Virus scanning, Disk encryption and ZFS hybrid storage pools.

I talked about Amanda network backup and recovery and how well it fits with OpenSolaris and ZFS plans. Amanda can backup ZFS filesystems taking advantage of ZFS snapshots. ZFS snapshots provides the ability to backup open files in Open Solaris. Amanda 2.6.1alpha OpenSolaris packages that are available for download takes advantage of this feature.  Amanda can also take advantage of ZFS send/recv …

Last week, Infobright announced it had open sourced its data warehousing software code. This is good news for the growing number of organizations looking to use MySQL as a data warehousing platform. According to IDC, MySQL is already the third-most deployed database for data warehousing and Infobright’s move will give users yet another reason to seriously consider MySQL for this application.

For those of you not familiar with the Infobright offering, it is essentially a column-oriented data store for data warehousing. While the column-oriented approach is not exclusive to Infobright (Kickfire’s MySQL storage engine is also column-oriented, as are some other non-MySQL data warehousing solutions on the market) Infobright does have some unique technology that Lou Agosta recently described as follows in his post on Trends in Data Warehousing for the Second Half of 2008: …

EnterpriseDB's Remote DBA Service addresses the market need for managing costs in a tough economy. It could also be an innovation to the open source business model. READ MORE

Open source software and data warehousing go together like beer and pretzels READ MORE

The Green Party of Canada has included Open Source Software in its election platform. How long until a major North American party follows suit? READ MORE

Are you a user of Microsoft Windows? Are you a user of a non-licensed copy of Microsoft Windows? Does it happen to be Windows XP Professional? Have you seen “blackouts“?

Apparently, from about the end of last month (August 27 2008, to be precise), users of pirated copies of Microsoft Windows XP Professional that also happen to be connected to the Internet will see their screens go black, and have no icons visible.

The esteemed folk at Microsoft Malaysia seem to think that there are 8.6 million users of Windows XP Professional in Malaysia (seems like a huge number, considering the population), and about three million will suffer from these “blackouts”. Only 35% of Windows XP Professional users are pirates?

Its a most interesting tactic. Annoy the user by allowing them to change their …