Posted on

OpenSQL Camp Portland OR, 14-15 Nov 2009

OpenSQL Camp Portland 2009 is coming up on the 14th and 15th of November. Eric Day (of the Drizzle project) is the lead organiser this time around.

I went to the first edition in Charlottesville VA last year which was organised by Baron Schwartz (Percona). It was a great event, like other unconferences but with specific focus on database technologies. Monty (MySQL), Brian (Drizzle), Richard (SQLite), Jim (Interbase/Firebird/Falcon), Bruce (PostgreSQL) were all these, as were various storage engine builders. Very interesting, and lots of informal fun. If you’re anywhere near, do go!

Even though noone from our gang is able to make it to this one, Open Query is sponsoring this event – for all the above reasons. It rocks and deserves every support.

Posted on
Posted on 3 Comments

What to do with the Falcon engine?

Keep it. Make sure it gets correctly positioned in the coming months.

It appears that with the Oracle acquisition, the reason-to-exist for Falcon is regarded as gone (a non-Oracle-owned InnoDB replacement), previously seen as a strategic imperative – much delayed though.

But look, each engine has unique architectural aspects and thus a niche where it does particularly well. Given that Falcon exists, I’d suggest to not just “ditch it” but have it live as one of the pluggables. What Oracle will do to it is unknown, but Sun/MySQL can make sure of this positioning by making sure in the coming months that Falcon works in 5.1 as a pluggable engine, perhaps also creating a separate bzr project/tree for it on Launchpad.

Then the good work can find its way into the real world, now.

Posted on 3 Comments