When I worked as an employee for MySQL Inc, the acquisition by Sun Microsystems in 2008 lead to several requirements about the acquisition.

• You were not allowed to talk about the acquisition publically.
• You were not allowed to communicate with any Sun (i.e. the acquirer) resources.

In other words it was “business as usual” which is really an oxymoron, because business will never be exactly as it was before the announcement. The ongoing delay in pending acquisition by Oracle Corporation is really hurting everybody with getting on with doing their jobs, being happy with their work, and making a difference in open source and in the lives of all the benefit from using MySQL.

I’m sure many that have words to say are disappointed, worried or even fearful of their own future careers. Comments are always welcome via Mr Anonymous using 10 minute email.

5.4.0 was released with a change in the MySQL Binary distributions, delivering only 1 64bit Linux platform and two Sun Solaris platforms. This was officially announced on April 21 2009 however the 5.4.0 Release Notes state 05 April 2009. So it’s not a big deal, but consistency would be nice.

I’ve seen in a few posts 5.4.1, so I decided to try it out. Spending the time to read what’s changed in 2 months with the 5.4.1 Release Notes before I go downloading and installing, you read.

This release does not differ from 5.4.0 except that binary distributions are available for all MySQL-supported platforms.

Is this going to be the new policy from Sun? Release for Solaris platforms first, then later release for other platforms?

What I found most significant with this new major version release is a change in the binary distribution, as seen on the Download page.

MySQL 5.4 is only available on 3 platforms:

• Linux (AMD64 / Intel EM64T)
• Solaris 10 (SPARC, 64-bit)
• Solaris 10 (AMD64 / Intel EM64T, 64-bit)

I was also surprised that this beta release highlights the emphasis of community contributions (long overdue), yet the community and indeed many employees of Sun/MySQL were simply unaware of this work. This is clearly a change in involving the community. While I applaud the beta status, hopefully a more stable product to start with, it’s development was done in a very closed company model.

While the Sun website shows the news in grandeur, the MySQL website is noticeably absent in any information of it’s owners’ acquisition.

On my professional side, as an independent speaker for Sun Microsystems with plans for upcoming webinars and future speaking on “Best Practices in Migrating to MySQL from Oracle”, this news does not benefit my bottom line.

“We have a community reception, that’s a long way to say free beer.”

“Google is the dial tone of the Internet, if it’s not there people start freaking out.”

“I am an insom-maniac, a late night hacker.”

“Having a successful catastrophic – Achieving your marketing goals, and your site crashes due to the load.”

“Ruby is a beautiful expressive fun language.”

(talking about cloud providers) — “Lock-in, it’s like marriage, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

“It wasn’t a red carpet, but it was carpeted.”

Event: CommunityOne East in New York, NY.
Article Author: Ronald Bradford

With today’s economy, the drive is towards efficiency is certainly a key consideration, it was quoted that dedicated hosting servers only run at 30% efficiency.

An overview again of Cloud Computing

• Economics – Pay as you go,
• Developer Centric – rapid self provisioning, api-driven, faster deployment
• Flexibility – standard services, elastic, on demand, multi-tenant

Types of Clouds

• Public – pay as you go, multi-tenant application and services
• Private – Cloud computing model run within a company’s own data center
• Mixed – Mixed user of public and private clouds according to applications

SmugMug was referenced as a Mixed Cloud example.

Cloud Layers

• Infrastructure as a Services – Basic storage and computer capabilities offer as a service (eg. AWS)
• Platform as a Service – Developer platform with build-in services. e.g. Google App Engine
• Software as Service – applications offered on demand over the network e.g salesforce.com

Some issues raised about this layers included.

• IaaS issues include Service Level, Privacy, Security, Cost of Exit
• PaaS interesting point, one that is the bane of MySQL performance tuning, that is instrumentation
• SaaS nothing you need to download, you take the pieces you need, interact with the cloud. More services simply like doing your Tax online.

Sun offers Project Kenai as well as Zembly.

Project Kenai

• A platform and ecosystem for developers.
• Freely host open source projects and code.
• Connect, community, collaborate and Code with peers
• Eventually easily deploy application/services to “clouds”

Kenai Features

• Code Repository with SVN, Mercurial, or an external repository
• Issue tracking with bugzilla, jira
• collaboration tools such as wiki, forums, mailing lists
• document hosting
• your profile
• administrative role

Within Kenai you can open up to 5 open source projects and various metrics of the respositories, issue trackers, wiki etc.

The benefits were given as the features are integrated into your project, not distributed across different sites. Agile development within the project sees a release every 2 weeks. Integration with NetBeans and Eclipse is underway.

Kenai is targeted as being the core of the next generation of Sun’s collaboration tools. However when I asked for more details about uptake in Sun, it’s only a request, not a requirement for internal teams.

The API’s for the Sun Cloud are at http://kenai.com/projects/suncloudapis.

Event: CommunityOne East in New York, NY.
Presenter: Tori Wieldt, Sun Microsystems
Article Author: Ronald Bradford

It’s difficult to get a good definition, the opening cloud definition today was Software/Platform/Storage/Database/Infrastructure as a service. Grid Computing, Visualization, Utility Computing, Application Hosting. Basically all the buzz words we currently know.

Cloud computing has the ideals of truly bringing a freedom of choice. For inside or outside of an enterprise, the lower the barrier, time and cost into freedom of choice give opportunities including:

• Self-service provisioning
• Scale up, Scale down.
• Pay for only what you use.

Sun’s Vision has existed since 1984 with “The NETWORK is the Computer”.

Today, Sun’s View includes Many Clouds, Public and Private, Tuned up for different application needs, geographical, political, with a goal of being Open and Compatible.

How do we think into the future for developing and deploying into the cloud? The answer given today was, The Sun Open Cloud Platform which includes the set of core technologies, API’s and protocols that Sun hopes to see uptake among many different providers.

The Sun Cloud Platform

• Products and Technologies – VirtualBox, Sun xVM, Q-Laser, MySQL
• Expertise and Services
• Partners – Zmanda, Rightscale, Kickapps
• Open Communities – Glashfish, Java, Open Office, Zfs, Netbeans, Eucalyptus

The Sun Cloud includes:

• Compute Service
• Storage Service
• Virtual Data Center
• Open API – Public, RESTful, Java, Python, Ruby

The public API has been released today and is available under Kenai. It includes two key points:

• Everything is a resource http GET, POST, PUT etc
• A single starting point, other URI’s are discoverable.

What was initially showed was CLI interface exmaples, great to see this still is common, a demonstration using drag and drop via a web interface was also given, showing a load balanced, multi-teired, multi server environment. This was started and tested during the presentation.

Then Using Cyberduck (a WebDAV client on Mac OS/X) and being able to access the storage component at storage.network.com directly, then from Open Office you now get options to Get/Save to Cloud ( using TwoGuys.com, Virtual Data Center example document).

Seamless integration between the tools, and the service. That was impressive.

More information at sun.com/cloud. You can get more details also at the Sun Microsystems Unveils Open Cloud PlatformOfficial Press Release.

Event: CommunityOne East in New York, NY.
Article Author: Ronald Bradford

The opening introduction was by Chief Sustainability Officer Dave Douglas. Interesting job title.

His initial discussion was around what is the relationship between technology and society. A plug for his upcoming book “Citizen Engineer” – The responsibilities of a 21st Century Engineer. He quotes “Crisis loves an Innovation” by Jonathan Schwartz, and extends with “Crisis loves a Community”.

He asks us to consider the wider community ecosystem such as schools, towns, governments, NGO’s etc with our usage and knowledge of technology.

Event: CommunityOne East in New York, NY.
Author: Ronald Bradford

In the email, all my AdWords campaigns are now disapproved, because of:

SUGGESTIONS:
-> Ad Content: Please remove the following trademark from your ad:
mysql.

Yeah right. I can’t put the word ‘MySQL’ in my ads. How are people to now find me? It would appear that many ads have been pulled not just mine. Is this a proactive measure by Google? is this a complaint from the MySQL trademark holder Sun Microsystems?

I’d like any comment, feedback or suggestions on how one can proceed here.

It reminds me of the days CentOS advertised itself as an “Open source provider of a popular North American Operating System”, or something of that nature.

They offer “Now you can get free Web hosting on Cloud Computing environment free of charge for up to 12 months. ”

The catch “accumulate 400 Points for participating on the site“.

A rather novel approach, you get 100 points for registering, but then only 5-15 points per task. The equates to approximately at least 30 tasks you need to perform, such as answering a question, or reviewing somebodies application. That seems like a lot of work?

In this case, Free has definitely a cost and time factor to consider.