Last week Solutions Linux / Open Source event was held in Paris.
Kuassi MENSAH (Head of Product Management Database Technologies, Oracle Corporation) presented the open source Oracle strategy. Linux, MySQL, virtualization, GlassFish, Eclipse, dynamic scripting languages ,... etc . It was well received by the audience. Knowing that MySQL organization will be kept safe in Oracle is perceived as a nice move.
Florian Haas(LINBIT) gave a tutorial on DRBD and did some demos with NFS and video streaming. And of course he reminded people that now since Linux 2.6.33, DRBD is officially integrated into the Linux kernel source. DRBD making the push for mainline Linux kernel is going to make HA easier.
As is normal now, some subjects are getting stronger :
The cloud was a hot topic with a good keynote by UBUNTU. Virtualization related to cloud architecture was also presented by hosting providers.
Extreme scaleout with Hadoop (Yahoo implementation of Google Map reduce) get a lot of interest.
NoSQL databases solutions was also a hot subject. I must confess that I was skeptical about broad usage of NoSQL beside the top web actors.
But this times I met my first customers talking seriously about it and doing serious testing with Cassandra and Voldemort.
So I decided to follow a tutorial on using Hadoop. very interesting.
Microsoft was gold sponsor of the event. Microsoft presented themselves as now as a good friendly contributor to the Linux kernel. Beside that they try to optimize all open source solutions running on Windows Server. And of course they want to play a key role in the new cloud economy. In their Azure cloud framework they can handle Linux, PHP, MySQL . They seem to sincerely want to be active and friendly in the open source segment.
There was a full set of tutorials on database technology. Postgresql, NoSQL technologies, Ingres, PostGIS were there.
I presented a tutorial on MySQL. Our MySQL users and customers are always as passionate. They are eager to use our next production releases. Many of them have started using InnoDB pluggin and its advanced capabilities (compression, fast index rebuild ...). Some have started testing MySQL 5.5 and are very impressed by all the performance gains + extra functionalities. MySQL is really on it way to become "the fasted open source commodity database on the market". I of course got some questions on when we will release GA version. MySQL proxy GA was also mentioned and asked for.