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Version 5.1 yearns to be bigger
MySQL User Conference MySQL owners past and present opened the annual user's conference to re-assure them Sun Microsystems has no hidden agenda for the open source database. Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz and software executive vice president Rich Green pledged it's not just business as usual for MySQL - they'll also commit Sun's engineering resources, sales and global support. Tackling concerns of a Sun agenda, given the company’s systems background and existing support for Postgres, Schwartz said the "secret plot" is simply to figure out how to serve the community. Green, speaking moments before, said: "The plan is the plan until there's a new plan - there is no plan." Former MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos said MySQL is "better off" with Sun through work on performance and scalability, and highlighted integration with Sun's open source Java application server and Java Enterprise Edition reference implementation, GlassFish. He cautioned, though, changes would not come immediately. "There's an enormous breadth and depth of engineering skill in Sun to make the database work faster - threading, memory management, I/O. It will take time - those things don't happen over night. It will take a year or two or three," Mickos said It's the first MySQL user show since Sun's $1bn acquisition. Opening the event, Mickos proclaimed he's loving the acquisition and work at Sun. Mickos is now Sun’s database group senior vice president, in charge of the company’s work on Postgres. Postres is regarded by many developers as better on performance and scale - relieve terms - than MySQL, but generally weaker on ease of use. "Maybe I'm still in the honeymoon period," Mickos said. "This is a $1bn vote for the LAMP stack." Announced at the show was the MySQL 5.1 release candidate, featuring a number of bug fixes and bread-and-butter database features targeting enterprise deployment. MySQL 5.1 is expected by the end of June, instead of the first quarter. The company feels the features in this qualify the product for a version 5.5 or 6.0 label, but is sticking with the 5.1 iteration. Mickos told the conference his team is being "much harder" on themselves as version 5.0 hadn't reached their quality standards. MySQL took flack for version 5.0 for bugs and poor features. Version 5.1 includes a number of major improvements, although there are some limitations in certain areas. There's table/index partitioning but partitioning is not parallel and the partitioning key has to be numeric. Also, there's row-based/hybrid replication but the company said this doesn't work so well with non-deterministic functions, which is one reason why MySQL has introduced both mixed or hybrid replication as the default - so the system will chose the best approach to take. These are issues MySQL has promised to fix in future versions. Also announced was a visual-based, drag-and-drop database design tool for modeling, build and change management called MySQL Workbench 5.0. Capabilities include the ability to synchronize databases, HTML and text reporting, and the ability to reverse engineer code - important features particularly when dealing with undocumented, legacy code. The tool is available in two editions, Community and Standard Edition, with the latter charged under a $99 annual subscription for Windows. Linux and OS X versions are in development, although there was no word on delivery. MySQL Workbench is intended to replace the need to write MySQL scripts. Original link: http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/20... VRM -- vendor relationship management -- is a concept that turns CRM on its head. It's designed to put consumers in control of the transaction and level the landscape. This is not an us-versus-them movement; rather, it is a deliberate approach by consumers that will be equally beneficial to vendors.
What’s Linux with a Lineage? Verio Linux VPS delivers root access, advanced FairShare technology for better performance, and support that's actually supportive. It's all from Verio, the Virtual Private Server technology pioneer with over 500,000 customers. Test-drive Linux VPS here. If you are in London on April 24th, you might want to check out the next monthly VRM Hub meeting. What is VRM, you wonder? For starters, VRM, or vendor relationship management, is the brainchild of Doc Searls, senior editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Project VRM is a community-driven effort headed by Searls and headquartered at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet Over 800,000 High Quality Domains Available For Your Business. Click Here. and Society. Its goal is to build an open source framework of standards and protocols for a category of tools that will let individuals and organizations interact on more equivalent terms. For an explanation of what that means in everyday terms, a good place to start is with Adriana Lukas, founder of the Big Blog Company and an enthusiastic advocate of the concept. "VRM is about consumers taking control of the transaction and thus the relationship with the vendor," Lukas told CRM Buyer. "It is a form of empowerment for the consumer, because it allows us to make available the information we want vendors to have." This is not an us-versus-them movement, she hastens to add. Rather, it is a deliberate approach by consumers that will be equally beneficial to vendors. Reaching Out That can be a difficult concept to grasp -- especially when thinking in terms of business relationships or new killer Web 2.0 applications such Facebook Latest News about Facebook or MySpace Latest News about MySpace -- admits Keith Hopper, who's on the Project VRM Steering Committee. Memory bugs can hide in your code and slow down or crash processes. Traditional code debuggers normally won't find them, but using a memory debugger can help speed up the process of locating and removing them, says Chris Gottbrath of TotalView Technologies.
What’s Linux with a Lineage? Verio Linux VPS delivers root access, advanced FairShare technology for better performance, and support that's actually supportive. It's all from Verio, the Virtual Private Server technology pioneer with over 500,000 customers. Test-drive Linux VPS here. Memory bugs, essentially a mistake in the management of heap memory, are caused by a number of factors and can occur in any program that is being written, enhanced or maintained. The fact that memory bugs can be introduced at any time is part of what makes memory debugging a challenging task. This is especially true with codes that are written collaboratively or that are being maintained over a long period of time, where assumptions about memory management can either change or not be communicated clearly. Memory bugs can also lurk in a code base for long periods of time. This can happen since they are impossible for a compiler to detect and are often not immediately fatal. During development and prototyping, the bug may simply result in the program using up a few more bytes of memory -- something that the developer is not likely to even notice at first. The memory bug then suddenly emerges as an issue when a program is put into production, ported to a new architecture, scaled up to a larger problem size, or when code is adapted and reused from one program to another. Unwanted Results These challenging memory bugs often manifest in one of several ways: as a crash that always happens, a crash that sometimes happens (instability) or just as incorrect results. Furthermore, they are difficult to track down with commonly used development tools and techniques, such as printf and traditional source code debuggers, which are not specifically designed to solve memory problems. |
Chris Lyman is setting in the middle of a perfect storm. As CEO of Fonality, Lyman is building an IP-PBX company that leverages Asterisk (an open source platform) and embraces managed service providers. In other words, Fonality has converged three hot markets (unified communications, open source and managed services) into a single solution.
I realize that big vendors — Avaya, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, etc. — are promoting unified communications solutions. But if you’re an MSP looking to get into IP telephony, it may be hard to ignore Fonality’s value proposition. At first glance, Fonality makes its living selling Asterisk-based telephony systems that run on Dell servers. But Lyman is quick to point out that Asterisk version 1.2 has about 195,000 lines of code. Fonality’s developers have written an additional 2 million lines of code in order to design a turnkey IP PBX for managed service providers and small businesses. Fonality’s latest IP PBX, known as trixbox Pro 2.0, serves 20 to 200 seats and has gained support for additional telecom standards outside of the United States. Fonality sells trixbox using a “hybrid hosted” model. This is a key point for managed service providers. MSPs and solutions providers deploy the trixbox (a specialized Dell server) within a customer premise, and the system communicates with Fonality’s centralized data center. MSPs can charge a monthly fee to monitor and maintain the trixbox systems, and most maintenance can be done using a Web browser, according to Lyman. MSPs can also re-brand the solution as their own. Unified Communications During an online demo yesterday, Lyman showed me how trixbox works with HUD (Heads Up Display), an employee dashboard that sits on your desktop and unifies company-wide phone calls, voice mail, presence indicators and instant messaging. Basically, you get a clear view of employee activities — who’s available, etc. — without eavesdropping on their conversations. Color-coded indicators show you who’s tied up on calls, who’s offline, etc. Although MSPs can potentially earn recurring revenue from trixbox, Lyman insists that the solution also offers up-front product margin as well. He asserts that trixbox Pro (a higher-end solution) delivers 50 percent reseller margins, and hands-free provisioning reduces or eliminates on-site visits. Guilty of Hype? If I sound a bit too upbeat about Fonality, feel free to post a comment and bring me back to earth. I’ve been writing about Fonality, Digium and other companies that have built solutions on top of Asterisk, and I’m convinced open source IP telephony systems are the wave of the future. Although Fonality has fewer than 150 employees, Lyman says Fonality serves more than 5,000 companies and 100,000 end users in 100 countries. True believers include Dell, which began reselling Fonality solutions in January. If a technology is good enough for Michael Dell, it’s usually ready for mass market adoption. Original link: http://www.mspmentor.net/2008/04...  [Updated 12PM] -- A fledgling industry group has unveiled a stackable, board-to-board expansion interface aimed at unifying I/O cards across many single-board computer (SBC) form factors. The Small Form-Factor Special Interest Group (SFF-SIG) calls its Stackable Unified Module Interconnect Technology (SUMIT) "the biggest advancement since PC/104."(Click for larger view of Express104 board with SUMIT interface)
The SUMIT interface comprises two small surface-mount connectors usable singly or together. Between them, they support both legacy low-speed peripherals and modern high-speed interfaces like USB and x4 PCI Express. They'll see use initially on PC/104-sized "Express104" boards, and also on pico-ITX and even much smaller form factors." The original PC/104 spec defined a mechanical board form factor, as well as an interconnect technology. However, many board vendors wound up putting PC/104 interfaces on boards in other form factors, such as EPIC and EBX, in order to leverage the rich ecosystem of PC/104 expansion boards. So, SFF-SIG decided to de-couple the SUMIT interface from any specific form factor, and come up with an interface that could prove useful on as many different form factors, used by as many different industries as possible. The result is SUMIT. Instead of using pins that pass all the way through the board, like PC/104, SUMIT uses a pair of one-sided, surface-mount "QSF/QMF" connectors with 52 pins each. Boards (typically I/O boards) that need pass-through do so with "vias" in the printed circuit board. Each connector is tiny, measuring less than an inch long, and optimized for a stand-off height of just a sixth of an inch (15.24mm).   The SUMIT physical interface (Source: Samtec) VirtualLogix announced that its VLX virtualization software will be available for Power Architecture processors. VLX for Network Infrastructure (VLX-NI) will now enable PowerPC processors to simultaneously run multiple operating systems -- typically Linux and a real-time OS (RTOS) -- for performance-critical telecom and datacom applications.
Specifically, "VLX-NI, supporting Power Architecture" supports Freescale PowerQUICC processors and IBM PowerPC 750 CPUs (see respective block diagrams below). Previously, VLX-NI has supported processors from Intel and Texas Instruments.  VLX-NI 3.0 architecture VirtualLogix's VLX products, which also include the VLX-DM (digital media) product targeting set-top boxes (STBs), and a VLX-MH (mobile handset) version, combine a compact scheduler with various nanokernel components, in order to share system hardware resources between multiple heterogeneous operating system instances. The company claims that the technology helps reduce bill-of-material costs while encouraging legacy OS/application reuse, software failure containment, resource utilization, and license segregation. VirtualLogix points specifically to the potential for creating virtualization-based multi-service business gateways that combine previously separate Internet access devices (IADs), router switches, security appliances, and IP PBX boxes. VLX-NI can accomplish this integration without compromising the system's deterministic real-time behavior, claims the company.  IBM's 750CL (Click to enlarge) |
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