Brian Aker parted ways with the mainstream MySQL release, and with Sun Microsystems, when Sun was acquired by Oracle. These days, Aker is working on Drizzle, one of several MySQL offshoot projects. In time for next week's MySQL Conference & Expo, Aker discussed a number of topics with us, including Oracle's motivations for buying Sun and the rise of NoSQL.

The key to the Sun acquisition? Hardware:

Brian Aker: I have my opinions, and they're based on what I see happening in the market. IBM has been moving their P Series …

I recently had a long conversation with Joe Stump, CTO of SimpleGeo, about location, geodata, and the NoSQL movement. Stump, who was formerly lead architect at Digg, had a lot to say. Highlights are posted below. You can find a transcript of the full interview here.

Competition in the geodata industry:

I personally haven't seen anybody that has come out and said, "We're actively indexing millions of points of data. We're also offering storage and we're giving tools to leverage that. I've seen a lot of fragmentation." Where SimpleGeo fits is, I really think, at the crossroads or the nexus of a lot of people that are trying to figure out this space. So …

When you only have 140 characters to get your message across, you have to depend a lot on context. For Twitter, a big part of that context has become location. Knowing where someone is tweeting from can add a lot of value to the experience, and it's Raffi Krikorian's job to integrate location into Twitter. Raffi will be talking about this and other location-related topics at the upcoming Where 2.0 conference. We began by asking him how Twitter determines location, and whether it will always be an opt-in option.

Raffi Krikorian: I think part of it is based around the philosophy of Twitter itself. We only publish information that you've explicitly given to us on a tweet-by-tweet basis. So for location on your tweets, it's all opt-in. You have to give us that location information, and we'll put it out. There are other things we do behind the scenes, like our local …

News providers, like most content providers, are interested in having their content seen by as many people as possible. But unlike many news organizations, whose primary concern may be monetizing their content, National Public Radio is interested in turning it into a resource for people to use in new and novel ways as well. Daniel Jacobson is in charge making that content available to developers and end users in a wide variety of formats, and has been doing so using an Open API that NPR developed specifically for that purpose. Daniel will talk about how the project is going at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Here's a preview of what he'll be talking about.

James Turner: Can you start by explaining what NPR Digital Media is …

If there's a site that exemplifies explosive growth, it has to be Twitter. It seems like everywhere you look, someone is Tweeting, or talking about Tweeting, or Tweeting about Tweeting. Keeping the site responsive under that type of increase is no easy job, but it's one that John Adams has to deal with every day, working in Twitter Operations. He'll be talking about that work at O'Reilly's Velocity Conference, in a session entitled Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site, and he spent some time with us to talk about what is involved in keeping the site alive.

James Turner: Can you start by describing the platforms and technologies that make Twitter run …

When we think about how government uses geographic information, we tend to think about USGS maps or census data, very centralized and preplanned projects meant to produce a very specific set of products. But Development Seed believes that there is a lot more that could be done if these types of data could be mashed up easily with each other as well as with alternate sources such as social networks. Eric Gunderson, President of Development Seed, will be speaking at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in June, and he recently took some time to speak to us about the potential benefits that open access to government data brings.

James Turner: Can you start by talking a bit about Development Seed and how you came to be involved with it?

EG: We're a strategy organization in Washington, D.C., and what …

Lenz Grimmer and Duleepa Wijayawardhana have made a series of interviews with the everyday heroes of MySQL. Some are oldtimers, others are new. Some previously worked for MySQL AB, others joined our team through Sun. But all are part of the fabric of today’s MySQL.

Lenz and Dups asked a number of interesting questions from these guys:

• Lars Heill, Release Engineering Manager
• Masood Mortazavi, MySQL …

Continued from Part 2

Q: So what are some applications or prototypes you are actually working on? Which do you see as the most interesting ones? Can I do something useful with this today already?

In general, what I find most interesting are the use-cases that utilize the aspects that make a web-server on a mobile personal device unique. Use-cases that take advantage of the fact that the context - location, surrounding devices and people, etc. - constantly changes, and the fact that the web-site "administrator" is always there.

And I get all worked up when I think on the implications - even if I obviously don't know what they all might be - if all mobile phones were equipped with a globally accessible web-server (I ignore all technical challenges). For instance, we already have an implementation of …

Continued from Part 2

Q: So what are some applications or prototypes you are actually working on? Which do you see as the most interesting ones? Can I do something useful with this today already?

In general, what I find most interesting are the use-cases that utilize the aspects that make a web-server on a mobile personal device unique. Use-cases that take advantage of the fact that the context - location, surrounding devices and people, etc. - constantly changes, and the fact that the web-site "administrator" is always there.

And I get all worked up when I think on the implications - even if I obviously don't know what they all might be - if all mobile phones were equipped with a globally accessible web-server (I ignore all technical challenges). For instance, we already have an implementation of …

Continued from Part 2

Q: So what are some applications or prototypes you are actually working on? Which do you see as the most interesting ones? Can I do something useful with this today already?

In general, what I find most interesting are the use-cases that utilize the aspects that make a web-server on a mobile personal device unique. Use-cases that take advantage of the fact that the context - location, surrounding devices and people, etc. - constantly changes, and the fact that the web-site "administrator" is always there.

And I get all worked up when I think on the implications - even if I obviously don't know what they all might be - if all mobile phones were equipped with a globally accessible web-server (I ignore all technical challenges). For instance, we already have an implementation of …