OStatic

Database company Continuent announced the availability of its Tungsten stack earlier today. These programs are meant to improve the replication capabilities of the open-source MySQL database, with an eye toward other database products in the near future. Tungsten is apparently written in Java, allowing it to run on a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, and the Macintosh.

Members of various open-source database communities will get together in mid-November for the first-ever OpenSQL camp. The free conference, which has room for 150 attendees, will be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is meant to help the members of all open-source database projects to learn from one another. Potential participants are encouraged to register on the Wiki, as well as to propose conference talks. Organizers want the camp to make it possible for participants to learn, to participate, to contribute, and to write code.

When you're working with a commercial software company, it's easy to keep up with their latest news: Between the company's Web sites, e-mail newsletters, conferences, and (increasingly) blogs, you can find out what is happening, and prepare yourself accordingly. Life in the open-source world is quite a bit messier, of course, in that there often isn't any central location or source for news. One of the key tools that the open-source community uses to keep in touch is blogs -- but it's not always easy to find all of the blogs on the subjects that interest you. That's where blog planets come in, providing a one-stop aggregation of many blogs on a particular subject.

Many of the best-known PostgreSQL hackers joined together several weeks ago for the annual PGCon, a conference dedicated to all things PostgreSQL. I've finally had a chance to review some of the talks and slides from that conference, and it not only gives me confidence in what PostgreSQL can do today, but also where it is headed in the coming years. Between scaling, geographic information systems, compatibility with other databases, and configuration management, presentations at PGCon contained a wealth of information for anyone using PostgreSQL.

Upgrades in the world of commercial software are typically forced upon users, and often contain unpleasant surprises. Users of open-source languages, databases, operating systems, and applications can't be forced to upgrade, and there is no financial incentive for the developers to get everyone to use the same version.

We look at several popular open-source languages and tools, to understand just how upgrades and compatibility are ensured in a world of open options.