I spent the last month taking a break from Open Source, partly due to FreeBSD 7.1 failing to hit the FTP servers as scheduled (any excuse), but mostly due to Santa’s early delivery of Ableton Live. Not really Open Source I may add but extremely cool nonetheless and a much needed break from coding!.

I find that staring too much at code can hamper the creative process (hehe), and as you know Creativity and Innovation go hand in hand with Open Source Software!.

Speaking of which, while I have been busy playing with waveforms and elastic audio, the Open Source world has been all guns blazing with cool releases like MySQL 5.1 GA, Open Solaris 2008.11, VirtualBox 2.1 and WordPress 2.7 to name a few.
You really cannot take a break these days without something big in the world of Open Source happening in your absence.

So the year is nearly at an end which got me thinking, what was the highlight of 2008 in the world of Open Source?.
I have to confess to spending more time than I would have liked this year working with proprietary software, always in combination with Open Source tools of course!. So if I had to highlight anything from 2008 it would be that Open Source is now more pervasive than ever. From your OSX laptop at home to the Linux servers at work, right the way up to the Internet’s biggest sites and services (running FreeBSD ), you’ll find Open Source Software behind every successful venture. In fact it is now so popular even Microsoft could not resist the urge to get in on the game!.

In fact there are so many Companies using Open Source now that proprietary software may actually be the minority! We all know everyone loves an underdog, so maybe propreitary software will be the hit in 2009? Then again with the state of the economy maybe not!

The biggest influence for me this year (both good and bad) had to be Sun Microsystems who played a large part in Open Source adoption in the enterprise and continue to lead the way with their open business model (GlassFish, MySQL, Netbeans, OpenJDK, OpenSolaris and VirtualBox to name just a few of their many contributions).

Although most of the time it seems like they cannot do anything right, one thing is for sure, without the corporate weight of Sun behind the Open Source ethos we may not have made it here so quickly. So while your saving big bucks with your ZFS storage and processing millions of transactions with MySQL, don’t forget to say thank you to Sun next time you are complaining about JavaFX or MySQL 5.1.
You may even want to swap those complaints for contributions (I know complaining is often easier). Thanks Sun!

So if you are one of the few companies yet to Open your code to the world, what are you waiting for? This Christmas give the gift of knowledge and share your achievements instead of fearing the competition and wrapping your code in a black box (don’t worry we won’t laugh at it). You’ll feel much better knowing you helped make the world a better place!

Until next year I wish you all a Very Open Source Christmas!! and as always Happy Coding!

After spending the best part of an hour installing the latest OpenSolaris 2008.5 release, which I may add was straightforward and a massive improvement on previous releases (ZFS default filesystem – very cool!) I headed over to the IBM website to download DB2.
After spending the best part of 10 minutes navigating the website and filling in forms I found no sign of the Solaris x86_64 version of DB2 9.5 Enterprise, all I could find was the SPARC install.

Never mind I thought, the Express-C release will do for now and the documentation does say that DB2 Enterprise will run on Solaris x86_64 so I can upgrade later if needed (that is if I can find the install ).

Having downloaded and untarred the install files I ran the setup program db2setup only to be greeted with an empty command prompt. The Getting Started guide did mention this might happen so I proceeded to run the fix xset fp+ /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/TTbitmaps only to find TTbitmaps missing….

Frustrated with the lack of support for OpenSolaris and the BSD’s from both Oracle’s 11G database and IBM’s DB2 9.5 Enterprise, I resigned to the fact that I would have to leave playing with Solaris for another day and install Linux instead. Gentoo to the rescue!.

It’s been a while since the last Gentoo release and I have to admit I gave up waiting for a release about a year ago. It was my desire to roll with BSD that prompted me to wander over to the Gentoo website – if only out of curiousity. What a surprise it was to see a 2008.0 release, Gentoo may not be Unix but if you are a BSD fan it is similar enough to enjoy working with it. Portage rocks!.

Installation may not be the fastest and certainly isn’t the easiest, but it is the most rewarding in that you get to watch your server grow from /mnt/gentoo to a high performance server right before your fingertips. It may take all day , but you get to control every step of the install giving you a better feel for how things work – you might even learn a thing or two along the way!.

The DB2 install under Gentoo was painless, all it took was a few USE entries and several emerge statements to get the OS ready to install the tarball.
All I have to do now is find the client tools for OSX….

I’m sure by now you would have read the great news that is Sun Microsystems acquisition of MySQL!

Sun have been forging ahead in the Open Source world with OpenSolaris, an Operating System that scales to Enterprise proportions and is an ideal host for the number one Open Source Database Server that is MySQL.

Whether this will have any impact on the MySQL Linux / FreeBSD / Windows offerings is something I am sure the community will be watching closely, but in my experience Java runs much faster on Solaris as it can take advantage of the MultiThreading libraries that help Solaris set those performance records.
Don’t forget, it was not that long ago that combined with Sun hardware MySQL was able to set it’s own world records!.

With that in mind it should only be a matter of time before we will begin to see the fruits of Sun / MySQL’s labour and I don’t know about you but I can’t wait!.

How this move will affect the future of other database servers such as PostgreSQL and Oracle I cannot begin to imagine.
Personally I never understood how Oracle devoted so much attention to Linux when the Oracle server (and App servers) have such a dependency on Java (which as I say always works better running under Solaris )?
As for PostgreSQL, Sun have always endorsed PostgreSQL on Solaris, will we see this focus switch to MySQL in the near future?.

One thing is for certain, MySQL combined with Solaris makes for one world class package that is going to be hard to beat!!.

While working on MySQLDump.java this weekend I decided to look into the new features that are heading our way in MySQL 5.1. It cannot be long before we see a general release and I needed to start thinking of ways to backup items like Events. This also made a good opportunity to start afresh with my dev server and try out the latest Solaris 10 8/07 release with GlassFish v2, the releases just keep coming! (SXDE 9/07 was just released).

The Solaris 10 install was as smooth as previous releases (Using Text Based) and once started took at least an hour or so to finish, I cannot remember the exact time as after checking the status a couple of times I forgot all about it. The general feel was much improved however, and the overall speed increase made the upgrade worthwhile.

GlassFish installed and ran as expected – easy. I would be very interested to see the difference in http performance when compared to Apache. Something for another day maybe?

Next on my list was MySQL 5.1.21-beta.
I originally downloaded the pkgadd version but failed to start the server due to a an [ERROR] Can't find messagefile. It was only after receiving the same message with the Tar distribution that I headed over to the MySQL Bug System where it seemed the issue was a known one – BugID 30678.

Not a major issue as the solution was to simply add --language=./share/mysql/english/ to server install / startup commands. Something that I am sure would have been fixed in the release candidate. I would like to see a more complete installer for Solaris, something similar to the FreeBSD port. The pkgadd install does not really offer much customisation and both the Tar file / pkgadd lack any sample service manifest files.

Once installed everything worked as expected and my first task was to install the Sakila test database. I intend to use this database to validate the operation of the MySQLDump.java app. It may not be the biggest database to work with but it does support a wide variety of data types, views, triggers etc. I am currently using the MySQL Toolkit to verify the backup and restore. If you have not used the Toolkit before (it’s written in Perl) it includes a nice utility that can test if 2 tables are identical – handy for validating a backup.

I envisage using unit tests for this purpose in future, but need to find a good book on TestNG first. A quick dump of the film_text table worked as expected and the data was identical to that supplied by MySQL, I must be on the right track! – If only I had more time…

I did however find time to attend the MySQL Backup and Recovery webinar this morning and was impressed with the new Backup API planned for MySQL 5.2 onward. I just booked my place at the European MySQL Conference and hope to get some more insight into future developments, or at least a copy of the MySQL 5.1 Cluster Certification Study Guide.

Whenever I decide to take a holiday I can usually guarantee that something cool will occur in the IT industry in my absence.

Now this holiday has been slightly different in many ways. I had to cancel my flight due to a sudden onset of Vertigo 1 day before I was supposed to fly. If like me you have never experienced Vertigo before, thank yourself lucky!. Having no sense of balance and intense room spin whenever you open your eyes is no fun at all, it took at least 2 days for me to stop being sick.

Having been able to actually use my laptop in the last couple of days I notice that the “cool thing” I usually miss on holiday turns out to be big trouble all over OpenSourceVille, the majority of which seems to revolve around licensing and intellectual property.

Who could miss the BSD vs GPL debate that I’m sure will rage for a long time after the ath5k driver had the BSD license removed in favour of the GPL. Stealing code was suddenly the headline for this action and the rift between the “Linux” developers and “BSD” developers increased once more.
Personally I feel the license should be as “Open” as possible and always apply the BSD license where I can. I want to be recognised as the author of any work I produce and protected against any misuse of such work (liability). With OpenSource development taking place in clear view nowadays, such visibility can only enforce your ideas and intellectual property. Why complicate things with over restrictive licenses…

While still on the topic of licensing it seems John Birrell is having to start all over again with a new port of DTrace on FreeBSD. The CDDL this time preventing kernel hooks from being added to the FreeBSD kernel. This seems such a shame as DTrace technology provides a massive benefit for software developers and will starting afresh really change the situation?, If not through licensing I am sure there must be patents on the intellectual property that Sun could enforce on any DTrace port? Just look at what is going on between NetApp and Sun at the moment.

So from licensing issues to patent infringement where it seems ZFS may not be as revolutionary as Sun claim and in fact NetApp actually came up with some of the functionality back in 1998. Dave’s Blog outlines all the details in what I can only describe as an excellent explanation as to how NetApp have had to file a lawsuit against Sun. Strangely enough I originally heard about this from the MySQL Planet! and not from any of the Solaris / OpenSolaris Planets each of which have around 45 Sun employee feeds?

We develop software to improve our way of life. Licensing and Patents although often necessary seem only to be hindering progress… Still it keeps us busy re-inventing the wheel.

On a good note, I was around to see the launch of the iPod Touch – if you can call that good…I might just wait until the drive space increases before I buy one, 16Gig seems tiny these days but then again the Touch would come in handy for on the go web browsing.
I also noticed Oracle 11g had been released (I obviously missed that one), although only for Linux at the moment?. I’m no Oracle expert but seeing as Oracle provide Java based development tools and my previous installs had a lot of Java involved surely Solaris would make a better fit?

Image combined using artistry from Project TIMEMACHINE – http://www.timemachine.ne.jp/

It’s been at least a month since I last installed Solaris and after receiving several e-mails with details on the next OpenSolaris build (every other week) I just couldn’t resist the urge to take it for a test drive.

The installation has not changed much (I just missed build 70 – it’s downloading as I type) and this time around I found myself running the text based install from within the GUI, not a bad thing as I prefer the text install and always forget to select that option at boot.
An hour or so later and I now have a Solaris box to play with, handy as I am looking at using Java for one of my projects, and as I have mentioned before, Java runs best on Solaris!.

Not one to stand still for longer than a minute, I began focusing my attentions on JavaEE 5. Once again I found myself choosing between GlassFish and Apache Geronimo, not an easy task. I was very impressed with Geronimo the last time I fired it up, but I have been hearing a lot of good things about GlassFish recently and the v2 release can not be far off.

GlassFish felt much quicker this time around and the admin interface is looking very “Enterprise Like”, very nice!. A quick deploy of Lucene and everything worked as expected, now for the hard part, design…

As for preempting change, well who could have missed the IBM/Solaris announcement last week. Solaris is finally getting the recognition it deserves and with IBM on board and Dell not far behind, we may now start to see the Small/Medium Business taking advantage of the Enterprise capabilities and World-Record performance.

With this information to hand I spent the weekend upgrading my Solaris Administrator Cert to include Sun Certified Network Administrator for Solaris 10. You need a good understanding of the IP stack to take this test, and in doing so you learn a lot about the differences between Solaris and other Unix variants.

If your still not convinced, try it for yourself, download your copy of Solaris 10 here, it’s free!.