[geeklog-devel] DB related snippets from FrOSCon

[Dirk Haun]

I attended FrOSCon[1][2] last weekend. Here's some mixed information that I took home and that loosely fits under the "database" category:

1) I had the pleasure to meet "Monty" Widenius, the creator of MySQL. As you probably know, he's now working on a fork of MySQL called MariaDB. Since he insisted that it would be really easy to install and be a drop-in replacement for MySQL, I decided to give it a try.

Well, what can I say - it worked. I now have Geeklog running on MariaDB on my Linux test box here. I've poked around a bit and haven't seen _any_ problems yet, which is nice.

There's no need for us to change anything, since MariaDB just uses the MySQL APIs in PHP. Even the binaries have the same names, so backups still work by running mysqldump. We should probably mention that in the documentation somewhere.

2) The omnipresent Henri Bergius gave an introduction into PHPCR, where CR stands for Content Repository or "something to store your content in". PHPCR is an implementation of the Java Content Repository standard (JCR) and this all goes roughly into the NoSQL direction. I'm wondering if this is something we could make use of in Geeklog for at least some of our content, e.g. stories. Something for a future GSoC project, maybe?

3) Two people from Microsoft actually came to the lion's den ;-) and talked about the open source stuff that Microsoft is doing. The talk wasn't too well received (nice show of MS tech, but not a lot about open source actually), btw. I approached one of the speakers afterwards, since I'm still looking for a way for us to get some licenses for Windows and MS SQL server to set up a test environment. I mean, we have the MS SQL code in Geeklog, but it may break at any time without us noticing since nobody from the core team has a setup to actually test this on. The MS speaker asked me to send him a reminder email about this and he's going to see what he can do ...

And for the record: FrOSCon was awesome, as always, and I had a blast :)

bye, Dirk

[1] http://froscon.org/
[2] http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=froscon%202011
[3] http://phpcr.github.com/