Posts Tagged ‘hosting’

A few great weeks for MariaDB

I think MariaDB has had a great few weeks recently and the timeline of these events are important.

  1. 27 November 2012 – WiredTree Adds MariaDB for Faster MySQL Database Performance (well worth reading their motivations to switch)
  2. 29 November 2012 – Monty Program & SkySQL release the MariaDB Client Library for C & Java
  3. 4 December 2012 – MariaDB Foundation is announced, see ZDNet coverage.
  4. mid-December 2012 – Wikimedia Foundation starts migrating Wikipedia to MariaDB, not for any other reason besides the fact that the Foundation was announced (more ZDNet coverage).

Now, there have been rumors that the client libraries are just rip-offs or relicensed. They are not. They’ve been in works for customers for several years now (yes, Monty Program does need to pay the bills), and there are many a feature difference. This will be addressed next week to ensure that people know what they’re getting.

There have also been rumors that the foundation was announced with regards to the connectors. Wrong again. Connectors were announced first, foundation came later (see timeline above). You don’t do these things in a span of one week, the talk for the foundation has been going on for months. I should know, as alongside Monty & Rasmus, I’ve been somewhat involved.

I agree that we need better communications (remember to like us on facebook, follow us on twitter @mariadb), and we’re working on it. Its also that time of year when people love to take vacations (I am one of them). All that said, watch http://blog.mariadb.org/ closely as that’s the official channel for all things MariaDB.

2012 has been a great year for MariaDB in general, as the project grows, we get more coverage (see news reports), unparalleled downloads thanks to our 5.5-series being released, and our expanding product lines. I can forsee 2013 being even more exciting. Thank you all for an amazing 2012.

Happy new year and here’s to a great 2013!

Podcast hosting options?

I’ve been looking around to find a host for podcasts, while toying with the idea of hosting it in Malaysia on my box as well. Self hosting has the advantage that its free, but at the same time, it may not be as fast for others outside the country, and then I’ve got to worry about it being a bandwidth hog.

I’ve been looking at PodBean, as well as libsyn. They all tend to have the same feature set: storage space that grows on a monthly basis, unmetered bandwidth, all starting at about USD$5/month. PodBean seems to offer just that little bit more, it seems, with video podcasting being supported just as well (this is a reason why the self-hosting mechanism isn’t one I’m after).

So, do you podcast? What do you use? Why?

Project Kenai

Sun is a huge company. So it comes as no surprise that I’m finding out about Project Kenai via Tim Bray, instead of some internal mailing list (believe me, there must be thousands).

Tim’s got a Q&A with Nick Sieger, who’s one of the chieftains behind Kenai. I find it amusing that the comparison is made against Google Code and GitHub – has SourceForge hit irrelevancy? I’m surprised Launchpad isn’t mentioned.

Project Kenai -- We're More Than Just a Forge - Coverflow style
Very Cover Flow like UI, with slider, etc. That’s Elliot Murphy, ex-Dolphin, current Ubuntero in the pic above

Nick goes on to say “We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we ourselves can control” – can control. Control is a loaded word, no? Especially in the land of open source.

The architecture is such that they’re on Sun servers (SPARC based), using GlassFish, Apache, Memcache and a single MySQL 5.0.45 database server (I’m guessing there’s a maximum storage of 146GB because they’re using SAS disks – they will implement replication soon). It seems they’re currently on 32-bit MySQL – they’re getting less than 10% CPU usage, and the query cache is working well for them (98% hit ratio). If graphs, et al turn you on, look at the slides from Fernando Castano, Achieving High Throughput and Scalability with JRuby on Rails.

Its interesting to see the mix of software offered – Mercurial and Subversion (for project hosting – there be choice, unlike the other services out there), Sympa (as opposed to common Mailman), and Bugzilla as the bug tracker. Oh, its built on Rails, so it will be an interesting experiment nonetheless, to see how Rails scales.

Why does Kenai interest me? Because for every project, you have a forum, a separate wiki, access to source code, mailing lists, and a bug tracker. Why should Kenai interest the MySQL community? Because maybe down the line, there will be integration with the Forge. Today, the Forge does not offer hosting (we have got the bits built-in, technically, but Launchpad seemed like a better bet for us, in the long run – the Forge is not in the storage business, its more a catalogue of information), mailing lists, forums, or a bug tracker.

After all, the tagline is “We’re More Than Just a Forge”. There look like there are some social networking aspects to Kenai as well – maybe some ohloh like features will make its way in due time? Maybe a Facebook application, created using Zembly will mash things up even. Who’s to say what the future of Kenai can bring.


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