OStatic

Members of various open-source database communities will get together in mid-November for the first-ever OpenSQL camp. The free conference, which has room for 150 attendees, will be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is meant to help the members of all open-source database projects to learn from one another. Potential participants are encouraged to register on the Wiki, as well as to propose conference talks. Organizers want the camp to make it possible for participants to learn, to participate, to contribute, and to write code.

Databases provide a great way to store information. But more important than that is their ability to retrieve information, and to do so in many different ways. Because database programmers, like all other programmers, don't like to re-invent the wheel, they often turn to reporting software, allowing them to concentrate on what they want to report, rather than how they want it to appear. One open-source reporting tool that is gaining momentum is Ruport, written in the Ruby language. Ruport is designed for use with Ruby applications, including those using Ruby on Rails.

What happens when your database is the bottleneck for your Web application?οΎ  You could create a database cluster, or even add new hardware.οΎ  But an open-source library called memcached offers another solution, putting frequently needed data in a server-accessible memory cache, whose values can be retrieved quickly and easily from almost every library.οΎ  Memcached is in use on many popular sites, including Facebook and LiveJournal, and you might find that it provides just the solution you need to make your site act faster.

Over the last few years, two dominant open source business models have emerged: Charge for service and support, or release the software under a dual license. EnterpriseDB, with Oracle-compatible database servers based on PostgreSQL, offers a third approach: Embrace and support the open source community, while charging for proprietary, highly-valued extensions. Today, in an announcement at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, the company announced that IBM is taking a stake in it, and more.