A New Open Source Community

If you are into social sites, check out the newest for OSS: Open Source Universe.

I like this because it seems to me that most people in OSS (developers, designers and even users) tend to cluster around projects. I mean, that makes sense when actually working on the project but mixing with other projects (on a regular basis and not just at the occasional conference) makes sense. If there is regular social interaction, I think that will trickle down to ideas which would make for even better products.

Of course, this isn't just an issue with open source. Technologists seem to want to spend most of their time with people dealing with the same technology. Who today isn't using (even if not developing) multiple OSS applications and tools? On a daily basis I am moving between PHP, MySQL, Postgres, Linux, FireFox, and a plethora of other tools.

So anyway, that's why I wanted to give a shout out to OSU. Now, having said all that, it's a new site and there just isn't much there right now. The forums need help. I don't like the fact that the forum is grouped around project. If I wanted to just hang out with Drupal folks, I would go to the Drupal forums. I think the forums should be grouped by technology. Let database folk hang together, let the PHP, Perl and Python folks hang out in the Language forum, etc.

The link exchange is a but cheesy for my but they are already listing some jobs.

If you don't already have a blog, you can start one. I would rather start one on blogger or wordpress though.

So, give the site a check and maybe post something in the forum.

Lewisc

Technorati : database, open source, oss

Postgres in the Cloud

The Amazon AWS blog has a good story about about Soocial.com. Soocial.com is an address book on steroid. It works with (or will work with soon): outlook, blackberry, gmail, mac address book and other phones. They just need to add Yahoo and Windows Contacts.

I wrote about it on my cloud blog, 100% AWS.

The AWS blog post has a good overview of the overall architecture. They are using Postgres and pgpool II on EC2 and EBS. They use RabbitMQ for messaging. For high availability they are using HAProxy and memcache.

It sounds like a pretty sweet setup.

LewisC

Technorati : amazon, aws, cloud computing, pgpool, postgres, postgresql

Survey Results - Open Source Usage

The results are not complete yet but I wanted to post some summary data as I get it. Here are the answers to a few YES/NO questions on open source usage.

Does Your Company Have an Open Source Policy	Percentage	Respondents
Yes	26.09	84
No	57.45	185
Don't Know	16.46	53

Does your company ALLOW the use of open source software	Percentage	Respondents
Yes	94.08	302
No	2.80	9
Don't Know	3.12	10

Does your company ACTIVELY use open source software	Percentage	Respondents
Yes	75.78	244
No	20.50	66
Don't Know	3.73	12

Does your company use any open source databases	Percentage	Respondents
Yes	79.50	256
No	16.46	53
Don't Know	4.04	13

Check out the summary of responses by country and primary database usage.

Technorati : database, osdb, survey

Final Week for Database Survey

This is the last week to participate in a database usage survey. If you haven't already done so, please take a few minutes to answer 25 questions.

LewisC

Technorati : survey

Database Survey hits 250

It hasn't been 2 weeks yet but the database survey I posted has hit 250 responses. I'm shooting for 400-500 responses total. While peeking at the data, I noticed that MySQL has had a good response and plenty of respondents. I didn't see any DB2 responses (for primary database) but there were plenty of Oracle responses (not as many as MySQL though). It's too bad that there hasn't been much in the way of a Postgres response.

I plan to leave it up for another 2 1/2 weeks (for a total of 4 weeks). If you haven't taken it yet, please do so if you get a few minutes. It only takes 5-10 minutes as the survey only has 25 questions.

Also, if you can blog about it, post the link on forums (without spamming), or spread the word any other way, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

LewisC

Technorati : database, open soruce, postgres, survey

Help Me Out - Take a survey

Hi. I've created a 25 question survey on databases and open source. There are about 10 demographic type questions (who are you, where are you, etc) and then a bunch of questions on databases and open source.

The results of this survey, and by results I mean all of the raw data, will be released to the public at the completion of the survey.

I ask for an email ID so that I can send you the results. This is totally optional and you will still be able to get the results should you chose not enter one. At the end of the survey you will be taken to a web page. The data will be available from that page. Bookmark that page and you can check periodically for the data. I will post intermediate ongoing updates of the data.

Click here to take the survey now. The survey was created with eSurveysPro.com, a free online survey software.

Thanks in advance!

LewisC

Technorati : database, open source, survey

Update on EDB Open Source Database Survey

Yesterday I posted about the results of the EnterpriseDB open source survey. In that post, I said:

I'd like to see the survey again and compare the results to the survey itself.

I discovered that, as of right now, the survey is still online.

Still no information as to when, or if, the entire survey results will be released. That's what I am most interested in.

LewisC

Technorati : database, enterprisedb, open source, postgres