OStatic

This week in Silicon Valley, the MySQL Conference and Expo is underway, and there are already questions appearing about whether the speakers will have to perform last minute tweaks to their addresses in light of yesterday's news that Oracle is acquiring MySQL's parent, Sun Microsystems. I doubt if there will be a whole lot said on that topic, but the conference has some interesting events, and Sun has also just announced MySQL Cluster 7.0 (a carrier grade version of MySQL), and the preview version of MySQL 5.4. Here's what's in the new releases, when they're available, and what's slated for the conference.

The season is nigh where many cultures across the globe observe some type of holiday that aims, in part, to reunite friends and family. If someone in the family is interested in genealogy, these gatherings are usually a prime opportunity to pull out any research, and coax some almost forgotten stories out of relatives.

Genealogists are always researching. Having had a tour of duty as a local history librarian, I've seen my share of dedicated, well-organized researchers. Most file away their information in spreadsheets or lightweight database programs. A few used programs specific to genealogical work, but I found they were few and far between, thanks to the high cost of applications that didn't necessarily offer more than a well organized spreadsheet.

I often wish I'd had the opportunity to show them GRAMPS, the open, cross platform, genealogical research software.

Yesterday Computerworld reported that MySQL cofounder and lead engineer David Axmark has resigned from Sun Microsystems. Axmark indicated that he felt he would be better off in smaller organizations and working with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis.

Axmark's involvement with MySQL has included heading the engineering, internal IT, and community relations efforts of the project. Since January, when Sun purchased MySQL, Axmark has been working mostly with the press and in community relations.

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.

One of the nice things about open source software is that it can experiment easily. Projects that don't have an obvious commercial route to success can still thrive and prove their usefulness, free of the demand to make money. One interesting project I've run across recently is WikidBase, which as the name implies crosses a wiki with a database.

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?ﾠ You could create a database cluster, or even add new hardware.ﾠ 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.ﾠ 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.

With the open-source database market split between quite a few contenders, the ones who are not at the tip of everyone's tongue need to find ways to distinguish themselves. Ingres - the once closed-source database that was spun off from Computer Associates a few years back - continues to aim for the high-end corporate market. Their latest move in this strategy is the release of substantial portions of their OpenROAD 4GL as open source under a GPL license.

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.

Someone was recently asking me which open source applications I would recommend to a business user who doesn't want to spend any money for a full set of individual applications or bog down a business with expensive licensing fees. In this post, I'll round up six free applications for doing everything from word processing to online meetings--with panache. You'll find a few open source applications here and also some freeware offerings, because I'm a firm believer that if a freeware app wins, it wins.