Lenz Grimmer's blog

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.

Thankfully my RSS reader has builtin-search capability, so I can quickly skim the full RSS feed from blogs.sun.com for keywords of interest. I found the following articles quite helpful:

• Setting up MySQL Cluster using Solaris Zones by Hashamkha Pathan walks through the steps involved of setting up a virtual MySQL Cluster setup on a single Solaris instance (for evaluation purposes only - this is probably not the best idea for a productive HA environment)
• Mixing SQL and shell commands in MySQL by Amit Saha explains how to write scripts that execute both SQL statements and unix shell commands using the MySQL command line client
• Improving filesort performance in MySQL by Neelakanth Nadgir provides some background information about MySQL's filesort operation that is being performed when records have to be sorted using ORDER BY.
• Ubuntu, PHP, NetBeans - part I by Petr Pisl is the first part of an article series that will explain how to develop PHP/MySQL applications using NetBeans on Ubuntu Linux. This part describes the basic installation of the required LAMP stack components.

If you are would like to learn more on how to develop on NetBeans with using a MySQL Server and how to create web apps that use MySQL as a backend, take a look at these two tutorials:

• Connecting to a MySQL Database
• Creating a Simple Web Application Using a MySQL Database

Over on the Novell Cool Solutions pages (which are powered by Drupal, by the way), I found this introduction on how to set up MySQL replication by Damian Myerscough. It walks you through the steps involved in setting up a classical master-slave replication setup.

 

I recently received a review copy of the book "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing) and finished reading it a few days ago.

The subtitle "A fast and practical guide" is a matching description - I managed to read the ~130 pages over the course of a week. The book is by no means an exhaustive reference manual, but it gives the reader a good overview about Xen and assists with performing the first steps and getting started.

 

IBM plans a residency to write a Redbook about the IBM DB2 for i5/OS as a Database Engine for MySQL:

Seize this opportunity to be among the first, elite IBM System i professionals worldwide to gain hands-on and practical experience with the MySQL on i5/OS. Working alongside and exchanging knowledge with some of the top database experts in the System i, you will develop a competitive edge that will serve you well in successful service delivery to System i clients. MySQL is used extensively with opensource PHP applications. As our customers deploy PHP web applications, many of them are looking to run MySQL as well.

The residency will take place in Rochester, MN from April 21st to May 16th. This book is going to be a nice followup to the first Redbook titled "Discovering MySQL on IBM i5/OS", which was finished in December last year. If you are curious to learn how to install MySQL on this platform (or would like to prepare yourself for participating in this upcoming residency), you can get a PDF from there, too!

I initially wanted to attend this residency myself, as I have been involved in writing a Redbook before and really enjoyed the experience. However, recent changes forced me to retract my offer to volunteer. IBM covers the travel expenses and will take care of accomodation for the time of the residency. If you are interested and think you have the time and skills and you would like to expand your knowledge about MySQL on the i5/OS Platform, please contact me at firstname at MySQL dot com!

I am happy to announce that my MySQL Dev Zone interview with David Axmark just went live - if you are curious to hear a few stories about how David and Monty started this whole thing more than 10 years ago, make sure to spend a few minutes and read it here!

Paul McCullagh works on a new pluggable transactional Storage Engine for MySQL, called PrimeBase XT. I met him for an interview a few days ago - you can now read it on the MySQL Developer Zone. Enjoy and have a nice weekend!

Some days ago I interviewed Ian Linden, the Director of Operations at Linden Lab (the company behind the virtual world simulation Second Life) about Second Life, Linux, MySQL and other OSS usage for their operations. I actually performed the interview inside of Second Life, which was quite fun, especially now that there is a Linux client! You can read the full interview on the MySQL Developer Zone. Have a nice weekend!

Update: The interview is now listed on the Featured Articles page on the MySQL Developer Zone, too. If you would like to know more about Second Life and MySQL, Ian will speak about this topic in more detail at our MySQL Users Conference.

The release of MySQL 5.0 introduced the MySQL Instance Manager (IM), which intends to replace the mysqld_safe wrapper script as well as the mysqld_multi script that keeps track of multiple MySQL instances running on the same machine.

This article will qive you a quick overview about the IM and how to enable and configure a minimal setup that uses the IM to manage the default mysqld instance. I used MySQL 5.1.7-beta for my tests, some of this may work differently on other versions of MySQL.

As the development of my previous blog software had been discontinued some time ago, I finally bit the bullet and moved to Serendipity now.

The move was actually quite painless and I was even able to import the most recent posts from the old blog (without the comments, unfortunately).

I have created rewrite rules that should redirect to the new RSS feeds, but I'd like to encourage you to subscribe to the new feeds advertised from the blog's front page soon (you could even subscribe to categories then). Thanks!

I've kept the old blog for archiving purposes, but it's no longer possible to post comments there.

Congratulations to Justin and Roger for getting the book out and published! I helped tech editing a few chapters (which looked very promising) and I am looking forward to the complete works. Good job, guys!

Markus yesterday mentioned that he started reading "Producing Open Source Software" by Karl Fogel, a book that I plan to read some time, too. The table of content looks promising, he covers a wide range of aspects related to building up and running an OSS project.

In addition to Fogel's work, there also is another interesting book about this topic: Matthias Stürmers master thesis "Open Source Community Building". It takes a slightly more scientific approach and documents the results of actually interviewing the members of various OSS projects about their experiences. It has been around for a bit, Matt Asay wrote a nice review about it in September 2005. I just read the rewritten german summary Mattias created for the german Open Source Yearbook and found it an interesting read! If you are running or plan to found an Open Source Software project, you might want to consult these books for some good advice on how to avoid common pitfalls and how to attract and foster a community around your project.

I finally finished my interview with Kai Seidler, who is one of the people behind the very popular XAMPP project.

You can now read the interview on the MySQL Developer Zone - I hope you will enjoy it!