(watch the video if its stripped in your feed reader)

Monty Widenius (MySQL) and Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL), decided to start sumo wrestling! It ended with a 5-0 score, advantage MySQL.

An attendee Tim Moore twittered: “Postgres is totally losing the sumo match. I’m migrating all of my databases to MySQL tomorrow.”

Monty says, this is what we do to people that leave Sun! In fact, if you didn’t already know, Josh Berkus, my esteemed colleague in the Database Group at Sun Microsystems, is leaving his post as the PostgreSQL Team Lead. We met for the first time, face to face at foss.in last year, and all I can say is I’m truly saddened to see him leave. But thanks to the magic of the open source world, we’ll still be interacting, I’m sure. Good luck Josh! (and better sumo practising next time, mmmkay?)

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2. Interview with Bruce Momjian (founder, PostgreSQL)
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What MySQL can learn from PostgreSQL
Joshua Drake

Compared us at OSCON 2007. MySQL lacked technical meat, compared to PostgreSQL. Since 2005, PostgreSQL booth had most visitors besides Mozilla.

MySQL Community is a second class citizen. MySQL AB does not advocate. They promote, they sell.

Does MySQL community advocate? No. PostgreSQL community does. In 2008, there are 7 planned events by community.

MySQL User Conferences? None that he knows of.
- go to a college and educate students
- teach a workshop maybe

There is nothing wrong with corporate conferences, but for a community to be truly sustainable, the community must have its own ecosystem.

What makes a community? Members and Users.

Ubuntu: most popular Linux distribution in 4 years. Rabid, helpful, friendly community members.
PostgreSQL: all walks of technical life drive it.

PostgreSQL Association in the US: drive PostgreSQL in higher education.

Where are the people contributing to MySQL because its MySQL the project?

PostgreSQL has defined community leads. MySQL doesn’t.

The community is the real stock holder in Open Source. To be truly successful, as an open source project (with commercial participation) the commercial participation must be a servant to the community.

In 5 years, there will be no MySQL. Sun won’t allow MySQL to exist. Maybe it will be Sun-MySQL. Why is the community not ensuring there is more groundwork, beyond the corporate entity?

What happens when the corporate culture disappears, now at Sun?

Sun spent $1 billion on something that is only worth $250 million. That money, was goodwill money based on name. You must produce profit of that billion dollars. So in the next 5 years, they must show the shareholders that the billion dollars gave them 25 years.

Changing the model of MySQL must happen for Sun to justify spending the money.

“I’m wondering if there’s an open source model to MySQL”.
MySQL controls all of the committers. Is MySQL an open source project?

Marten Mickos asked him to give this talk. No one is going to throw tomatoes at him.

“I’m not here to bash MySQL” – its just differences that he sees.

People have a tendency to change their goodwill gestures when their coffers are getting thinner. So Sun may make hard decisions to focus on sales.

No co-opetition, that is not sustainable.

Without diversification, the project suffers. Look at the manual, look at the things that have changed. Really? What?

“Enterprise customers get the alpha code, and the community gets it back later after its tested”.

CommandPrompt will be fully 100% open source in under 60 days. EnterpriseDB is the opposite, they’re closing up more and more.

MySQL adds features more quickly than PostgreSQL due to its willingness to add features to stable releases. PostgreSQL only does so in major releases, causing 12-14 months breaks between feature sets. May 2007, no new features, in GA releases

PostgreSQL only adds features based on:
- correctness
- maintainability
- portability
- stability

Attacks someone from Fox Interactive Media. They have issues with PostgreSQL, and they call Sun, but Joshua wants people to communicate to the community. Sponsor someone. Sun doesn’t address your needs. This is the 5TB problem in PostgreSQL.

MySQL is an embarrassment at being the “world’s most popular open source database”. That’s like Microsoft.

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1. MySQL vs. PostgreSQL
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Want to learn more about DTrace and MySQL? Then come to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, in Santa Clara, California, because on Thursday, Ben Rockwood, from Joyent, will be presenting a session on DTrace and MySQL (read the abstract, its good). The talk covers the fact that you can get useful information currently, even without the embedded probes in current versions of MySQL. For more DTrace and MySQL tips, don’t hesitate to read Joyeur, Joyent’s weblog.

DtTace, Web 2.0, Java, AJAX, PHP and the rest (notes from the talk)
by Peter Karlsson, Solaris Technology Evangelist

DTrace now has providers for a large number of languages: JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby. Perl is on the way.

MySQL 6.0 will have DTrace support; PostgreSQL already has this in Solaris currently. If building from source, there’s a flag that needs to be enabled. A lot of work was done thanks to a community member.

You need a Solaris kernel. Ported to OS X and FreeBSD. Supports “dynamic instrumentation”. D is the dynamic language, used to script instrumentation

Very common request? Find how much time is spent in a given function. The thread local variable (self->variable = expression;) – nowadays, you can be running two threads coming down in the same function call. DTrace – so this is great for multi-threaded debugging.

PHP doesn’t have DTrace integrated, so, get the Coolstack PHP.

DTrace probes have been added to Mozilla to help debug JavaScript applications. This is available in Firefox 3 (in beta now). There is also a generic DTrace framework, that isn’t just JavaScript only – the networking parts of Firefox, to look at how DNS lookups work, etc. all can be instrumented via DTrace.

Further reading? DTrace and PHP, demonstrated.

Technorati Tags: dtrace, php, javascript, mysql

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• There’s this idea of a global mesh nowadays, and its leading to a changing society. FOSS is all about it. And “Its Going Mainer Mainstream”!
• Investment in skills is important for any country. There should always be a preference to invest in the local workforce. Simon mentions that all this allows you to keep the sovereignty of your country.
• You cannot pirate free software. Want to avoid foreign interference, and all the worries of WIPO? Free software is the answer.
• Simon Phipps thinks “software patents are bananas”. I tend to agree.
• I also found out that the Sydney Opera House owns a trademark on all photos taken of the Opera House. That seemed retarded, and not long after, I found out this was similar with regards to the Petronas Twin Towers in KL. I can take a photo, but apparently, I can’t sell it on say, ShutterStock Photo or anything. Ridiculous.

I didn’t get to attend the next round of talks, mainly because I was giving my talk! The room was full, the questions were good, I was happy. I read a report, from Ditesh, so that’s a pretty good summary, I guess.

I really wanted to attend the Mozilla talk from Mitchell Baker (mainly because I’d have liked to have met her), however, I couldn’t resist going to the PostgreSQL 8.3 talk by Josh Berkus. It was an interesting talk, well rounded, with the occasional jab or two at MySQL. The attendance was about half full, and we had some unwelcome loud noises in the talk! I took away from it:

• Contributors are full participants. PostgreSQL is owned and run by the community. Write a patch, and its accepted? Be prepared to write documentation.
• CSV logging is now built-into PostgreSQL 8.3
• I was introduced to Heat Only Tuples (HOT). Benchmarking, then seems to be skewed towards greater performance gains in PostgreSQL
• MVCC: Overwriting model (InnoDB, Oracle) or the non-overwriting model (PostgreSQL, Firebird)
• The attention to standards is great. Extending SQL, to create the SKYLINE feature, to power approximate queries, however, this was rejected for the core of PostgreSQL, and is available in their foundry
• Release engineering in PostgreSQL is amazing. 6 weeks development, 2 weeks commit, and repeat.
• There are doubts of an embedded PostgreSQL – this is what SQLite is for. I like the focus of the core team here.
• You never want PostgreSQL running on handheld devices – heavy writes it has.
• “There is no one size fits all solution, for databases” — Josh Berkus. I tend to agree
• Why are few hosting companies providing PostgreSQL? Customers don’t ask for anything else? CPanel doesn’t run with PostgreSQL. pg_hba.conf (my.cnf equivalent) needs fixing, for controlling quotas (can be implemented via tablespaces), etc.

Next up, was the OpenMoko: What, why and how talk by Harald Welte. The talk was packed to the brim, and I didn’t learn much more than I’d have found out from their website. Its an interesting project, but with the upcoming Android, and the idea that I need a working phone now, I don’t know if OpenMoko is right. Besides, the battery life on that thing is horrid.

Colin Charles and Josh Berkus (photo, courtesy Josh Berkus)

Spent time talking to Josh Berkus, in the corridor, nearby the Sun booth about life, the universe, and everything. Then it was Lightning Talks, and dinner…

Technorati Tags: foss.in, foss.in 2007, sun, foss, strategy, philosophy, postgresql 8.3, simon phipps, josh berkus

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• PostgreSQL has stringent quality assurance. This is because there isn’t the “luxury of putting out a bad release”. He mentions that in the world of open source, there is zero tolerance for things that don’t work; I however can find many examples contradicting this line of thinking. Release engineering is largely dependent on humans and they do make mistakes.
• “People are more confident with us that some of the commercial databases.” I believe this largely is how your company is run – tech-oriented or suit-oriented. Worse if you’re suit-oriented and largely public. Investors and upper management need to blame someone when things go wrong, and thats why support services are so great in the open source world. Accountability is key. The ability to fix customers problems is key. Going off on a tangent, Michael Meeks, distinguished engineer at Novell and OpenOffice.org hacker extraordinaire basically said:
  

  Ubuntu, claiming to ship and support OpenOffice.org, it’s a total joke – they have a part-time packager. At Mandriva, for example, the OpenOffice.org packager is a self-described ‘not a C++ programmer’. So how you can then go and say ‘we’ll support you’… Novell, at least, has people across the board working on the codebase, with a good understanding of lots of issues.

• Bruce mentions evolution – from stopping PostgreSQL crashing, to performance tuning, to enterprise features. He reckons that 8.2 is Enterprise Ready, and 8.3 and forward is going to include “revolutionary features that go beyond things you can’t do with other databases”.
• My favourite quote:
  

  “If you look in the next five years, PostgreSQL will be a poster child for databases period,” he said. “There is not really another database that’s enhancing at the speed of PostgreSQL, so what that would look like is hard to say.”

• Pretty bold statement, eh? No roadmaps, like most open source projects. I actually think that’s a plus point, because roadmaps suit suits, but are completely inaccurate most of the time.

Technorati Tags: postgresql, interview, bruce momjian, michael meeks, accountability, database

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