Lenz Grimmer's blog

This blog post is a by-product of my preparation work for an upcoming talk titled "Why you should be using a distributed version control system (DVCS) for your project" at SAPO Codebits in Lisbon (December 3-5, 2009). Publishing these thoughts prior to the conference serves two purposes: getting some peer review on my findings and acting as a teaser for the actual talk. So please let me know — did I cover the relevant aspects or did I miss anything? What's your take on DVCS vs. the centralized approach? Why do you prefer one over the other? I'm looking forward to your comments!

Even though there are several distributed alternatives available for some years now (with Bazaar, git and Mercurial being the most prominent representatives here), many large and popular Open Source projects still use centralized systems like Subversion or even CVS to maintain their source code. While Subversion has eased some of the pains of CVS (e.g. better remote access, renaming/moving of files and directories, easy branching), the centralized approach by itself poses some disadvantages compared to distributed systems. So what are these? Let me give you a few examples of the limitations that a centralized system like Subversion has and how these affect the possible workflows and development practices.

So you're a small startup company, ready to go live with your product, which you intend to distribute under an Open Source License. Congratulations, you made a wise decision! Your developers have been hacking away frantically, getting the code in good shape for the initial launch. Now it's time to look into what else needs to be built and setup, so you're ready to welcome the first members of your new community and to ensure they are coming back!

Keep the following saying in mind, which especially holds true in the Open Source world: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression!". While the most important thing is of course to have a compelling and useful product, this blog post is an attempt to highlight some other aspects about community building and providing the adequate infrastructure. This insight is based on my own experiences and my observations from talking with many people involved in OSS startups and projects.

Tomorrow (Thursday, 11th of September) at 9:00 PST/16:00 UTC/17:00 GMT/18:00 CET, there will be an new free MySQL University Session. MySQL University started as an internal training program for MySQL engineers, to share and spread knowledge about their areas of expertise and has been available to the public for quite some time now. It covers a wide range of technical topics around the MySQL Server and usually takes place once per week.

For the first time, the presentation will not be performed by (former) MySQL employees/developers, but by two of our "Sun Classic" colleagues: Jyri Virkki (OpenSolaris Web Stack community lead) and Murthy Chintalapati (Sr Engineering Manager, Web Stack development) will talk about the OpenSolaris Web Stack:

OpenSolaris Web Stack is an OpenSolaris project and community building an integrated stack of popular open source web tier infrastructure technologies such as Apache HTTP server, MySQL, memcached, PHP and Ruby On Rails optimized for Solaris platform. This session introduces OpenSolaris Web Stack, its status and future development including addition of newer technologies such as lighttpd, Varnish etc., as well as the ease of use features for developers and deployers. We will also be discussing an experimental web stack IPS package repository and it could be leveraged to build and make available popular end user applications such as Drupal.

MySQL University sessions are free to attend - all you need is an IRC client (to post your questions and comments) and an audio player capable of playing back an OGG audio stream, so you can listen to what is being said. See the Instructions for Attendees on the MySQL University pages for more information on how to log in and attend. The audio stream will be recorded and published on the MySQL University pages for later consumption, in case you can't make it or want to listen to a previous session.

One of the sessions at DrupalCon I attended was Larry Garfield's talk about "Drupal Databases: The Next Generation", which gave me a good insight into the current state of the Drupal database layer and how they plan to overhaul it for Drupal 7. The key points that I took away:

• A new API based on PDO
• Object-oriented, requiring PHP5
• Support for using prepared statements
• A unified access API
• A query builder
• More support for other database systems (currently Drupal supports MySQL and PostgreSQL only). In particular, they are keen on adding SQLite support, to ease local development.
• Support for master-slave replication (by randomly distributing reads among the hosts)
• Support for using different database types in parallel (e.g. using SQLite for read-only tables, MySQL for everything else)

The slides and a video of the presentation are available, if you want to check it out. There is a task list on the Drupal.org web site that keeps track of the ongoing activities.

I had a nice chat with Kieran from Acquia at DrupalCon last week - we discussed how people running local Drupal user groups could expand their outreach into other communities, in particular into the MySQL User Groups. Scott Mattoon captured our conversation on video, which is now available on blip.tv:

Click To Play

The gist of what we talked about: if you are organizing a local Drupal User Group Meetup, check out http://mysql.meetup.com to find out if there is a local MySQL user group nearby. Chances are high that there is! And if not, you may find at least people in the area that would be interested in meeting about this subject. We also maintain list of user groups on the MySQL Forge Wiki. Consider extending your invitation for your next meetup to these folks as well! It's very likely that someone would be interested to learn more about Drupal. The same applies to other user groups, e.g. from the PHP community.

I personally run a MySQL User Group here in Hamburg, and I usually extend my invitations to a number of channels and mailinglists, including the local PHP, Perl and Linux User Groups. Every once in a while, a new member from these communities shows up.

So this thing works the other way around, too: if you are the organizer of a MySQL Meetup, have you thought about looking at http://groups.drupal.org/ yet? Maybe you will find a Drupal User Group in your very own town that you could invite to learn more about MySQL and exchange contacts? If you are looking for more tips on how to run and expand your User Group, I've created a page with useful hints about this topic on the MySQL Forge Wiki. Your feedback and additions are very welcome!

I'm back home from DrupalCon 2008 now - it has been a great event! I met a lot of nice people from the Drupal Community and learned a lot about this CMS. I've been very busy in uploading the remaining pictures from the event to my gallery - so here's for your viewing pleasure:

• Impressions from Szeged
• Day One - 2008-08-27
• Day Two - 2008-08-28
• Day Three - 2008-08-29
• Day Four - 2008-08-30

I also gave two talks and held a BoF there - the slides have now been attached to the session nodes, one of them (the HA session) even includes a video recording:

• bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system
• MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices
• High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo (Video)

I've also uploaded some pictures from FrOSCon to my Gallery now, hope you enjoy them! The slides of my FrOSCon talks are now uploaded to the conference system as well:

• OpenSolaris für Linuxer
• bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system

Hello and greetings from DrupalCon 2008 in Szeged, Hungary!

We (Thierry Manfé, Scott Mattoon and myself) are having a great time manning our booth and talking about Drupal, MySQL and Open Source@Sun with the nice crowd of Drupal Users and Developers here. Sun is a gold sponsor of the event and we're giving a number of sessions as well.

Today I gave my first presentation about MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices - unfortunately I ran a tad bit out of time at the end... The slides have already been attached to the session page, so you can read up on the last few things I was going to talk about. Feel free to contact me, if you have further questions!

Tomorrow I'll be talking about High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo, which will also include a practical demonstration of a two-Node Linux Cluster, performed by Jakub Suchy. In the afternoon, I will also hold a BoF about bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system

I've also uploaded some pictures from the event (and some impressions from the city) on my gallery (more will follow later). Enjoy!

I just got informed that two of my session proposals for DrupalCon 2008 got accepted - I will be speaking about the following topics there:

• MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices
• High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo

The second talk will be held in cooperation with Jakub Suchy, who will take over the practical demo. Sun Microsystems is a Gold Sponsor of the event and I am glad that we can show some support for this truly amazing and vibrant community CMS. DrupalCon 2008 will take place from August, 27th-30th in Szeged, Hungary. The list of proposed talks looks truly impressive! Among the key note speakers will be Dries Buytaert and Rasmus Lerdorf. I look very much forward to this conference. If you have a chance, make sure to attend it!

This article describes how to install the Drupal 6.2 CMS on MySQL 6.0, using the Falcon Storage Engine. The operating system is a default Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" (x86) installation.

I will make a few assumptions here, in order to keep the instructions simple: a fresh OS install, no other MySQL databases or web services are running or have already been installed. Both MySQL and the web server are installed on the same host. You should be able to become root to install packages and to have access to the local file system and the system configuration.

This article will explain how to install and configure Apache/PHP, MySQL 6.0 and Drupal 6.2.

Yesterday, Drupal 6.0 was officially released - check out this screencast to get a 29-minute tour on the new features in this release.

We'd like to congratulate the Drupal Developer Team and Community for reaching this milestone and are happy that the MySQL Server continues to serve well as the database backend for this awesome content management platform!

I had the pleasure of evaluating and reviewing a previous release of Drupal for the Open Source Content Management System Award from Packt Publishing and it has been one of my favourites.

Keep up the good work!