Xaprb

Did you know that you can subscribe to Oracle Magazine for free? It doesn’t have much content on MySQL, but it’s not such a bad thing to stay at least a little bit in touch with what Oracle is doing with the Oracle database server, too. You can subscribe online free.

I’ll be speaking at IOUG’s Collaborate conference in Florida the week of April 10-14. My session is called MySQL Performance Basics. For those who know MySQL, this won’t be exciting, but if you’re new to it, I hope it will be a good orientation to what you should focus on and ignore.

Sheeri Cabral posted a good round-up of the MySQL talks at Collaborate on the PalominoDB blog.

There’s lots of buzz lately about the so-called “open-core” business model of Marten Mickos’s new employer. But this is nothing new. Depending on how you define it, InnoDB is “open-core,” and has been for a long time. The InnoDB Hot Backup (ibbackup) tool was always closed-source. Did anyone ever cry foul and claim that this made InnoDB itself not open-source, or accuse Innobase / Oracle of masquerading as open-source? I don’t recall that happening, although sometimes people got suspicious about the interplay between the backup tool and the storage engine. Generally, though, the people I know who use InnoDB Hot Backup have no gripes about paying for it.

What is the difference between open-source with closed-source accessories, and crippleware? I think it depends on how people define the core functionality of software. Some might say that backup is core functionality for a database; and others would point to mysqldump and say that InnoDB isn’t crippleware as long as there is some alternative.

I think InnoDB is an interesting case that illustrates what can happen when commercial and GPL play together. Part of that story is the appearance of XtraBackup, an open-source competitor to InnoDB Hot Backup. Everyone’s subject to the rules of the game, unless they restrict the “core,” which would make it non-open-source to begin with.