Been asked a few times in the last few days about where my slides are from my MySQL keynote from *last* year.

Ooops.

Um, yeah.  Sorry about that.  Here’s a link to ‘The SmugMug Tale’ slides, and you can watch the video below:

Sorry for the extreme lag.  I suck.

The important highlights go something like this:

• Use transactional replication.  Without it, you’re dead in the water. You have no idea where a crashed slave was.
• Use a …

The bursting of the internet bubble was good for the computer industry.

Many of us didn't like the medicine, but I can't remember a single customer upset at the idea of paying $20,000 for computing infrastructure that used to cost them $100,000. The price compression came from open source software, and a move toward general purpose servers, and resulted in companies formerly making 65% gross profit on products (Sun among them) facing a new reality.

But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Since then, Sun's built the biggest open source software business around (see this report for details), from platform software to application infrastructure (even a …