Infobright Blog

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In a concentrated effort to improve upon our users' experience in working with Infobright Community Edition, a new open source software download will be released shortly.  This download will be released under the MIT license and will be supported through the Community.  It will include sample projects written in C++, C#, Java and PHP, with future projects in Ruby and Silverlight.  These example projects have been organized by me and coded by interns working with Infobright from the University of Illinois.
 
The intern program was designed to bring in computer science and computer engineering students and give them an opportunity to work hands on with Community-driven software projects.  The transition from classroom to the real world can often be a challenging experience for young developers.  Adoption into the organization's community, adapting to the corporate infrastructure and the pressure to deliver quality code are just a few of the challenges that students face.
 
One of my personal goals in working with interns is to help instill a sense of confidence and humility within their professional manner.  The confidence factor is key for allowing developers to make decisions and the humility factor is essential in giving the developer a sense of possibility in making decisions.  These two traits combined gives young engineers the ability to be very effective in a industry that quickly changes and moves at the speed of research.
 
All of the projects within this single download are examples of how to connect and work with Infobright.  Each of these sample projects have well written comments and readme files for each language and should allow for the quick development to testing process.  One of the goals of this open source release was to provide a boilerplate project for each language that can be utilized as a "starting point" for individualized projects.  By assisting in this starting process, we are helping software developers to focus primarily on their business logic and architecture needs.
 
This software will be released to the public and available for download starting Friday, May 18th from the Contributed Software page on http://www.infobright.org. This release will be updated from time to time with additional projects supporting new architectures and platforms.  The next release will contain additional projects written in Ruby as well as Silverlight using various development and design patterns. 
 
Infobright applauds all of the interns that are participating in our intern program and we look forward to supporting the Open Source Community with further contributed software releases.

Doing your first webinar can be a harrowing experience. Although it was exciting, I found that no matter how prepared you are, it is still a very humbling experience. Note to self, stand at your desk next time instead of sitting, and close your eyes and imagine you are in front of the crowd and that everyone is in their underwear (LOL). All kidding aside, I found that it can be very hard to be a polished presenter until you have experienced trying to be a presenter; no matter how well you know the information. No matter how many times you repeat it in your head, unless someone is standing in front of you listening to you, it is different. I have no desire to be a salesman. But I do have the passion and enthusiasm for what I do, and that makes the difference.

How many of you feel like you are doing exactly what you wanted to do in your life with your careers or feel you are exactly where you want to be in your career? This is something that I have been realizing for myself since I took on this role with Infobright. What it comes down to is this: I love what I am doing and the company I work for. Every day I strive my hardest to make a difference in the work that I do, which can be challenging; but for me, it is incredibly rewarding.

When I first took on this role, I had to quickly learn about the technology. Which for me, coming from a software engineering background, was exciting and happened fairly quickly. The challenge was taking on the responsibility of the role and understanding how the Community Manager role fits within the company's infrastructure. But that is where the challenge that I enjoy in my career fit perfectly within where I want to be.

"You have the career you want, so what are you going to do with it? "

I have outlined a few objectives that are guiding posts for everything I am aiming to accomplish this year as Community Manager. Primarily, I want to improve upon your experience in working with ICE. To help achieve this, we (the University of Illinois interns and I) have a multitude of projects centered around improving the overall download process, and began engineering a handful of open source software projects centered around working with ICE/IEE. These projects are going to be released to the community and will contain source code and examples of best practices on various topics. These projects will be released in a variety of software languages to help support multiple platforms.

Another objective I have is to increase awareness by working with other communities. We already have an incredible community with a lot of great members. I consider that the current community is truly the core team. The support that is present within our community is amazing and very encompassing. By this I mean we support such a variety of topics from different schema and performance query issues to working with different platforms and compilation issues, to topics that cover industry trends. This community in its current state is truly a resource for the rest of the world. One of my goals in talking with people in other communities is underscoring the value of our community as an incredible resource.

I want to end this blog with a pat on the back to all of our community members.  You have done a great job and I hope that you all keep up the good work.

I had the chance to attend the MySQL Percona 2012 conference just a few shorts weeks ago in Santa Clara. The conference and expo were a three day event that focused on a variety of topics that ranged from performance and tuning to scaling and backup technologies. Although the attendance has been slightly diminishing over the last few years, I still felt that the demographics of the attendees were more defined. Among them were the software architects and engineers, database administrators and chief technology officers that were seeking ways of handling their normal day to day issues surrounding Big Data. Many of the attendees commented quite nicely about the presentations and the general tenor of the conference seemed very amicable.

Some of the most notable exhibitors had new open source technologies and frameworks that are starting to become noticeable. Companies like Sphinx, an open source search technology, had quite a few of their engineers at the show and were ecstatic about feedback they got from the attendees. Another growing company, Akiban, was also there to introduce their table grouping framework for speeding up queries. There was a bit of buzz around their booth because they had this Lego contest that attracted quite a few creative types, but even more so due to the up and coming release of their software to the open source world. Most of the MySQL database companies were present at the expo, along with a range of NoSQL and NewSQL technologies like NuoDB. On the hardware side of things, technologies like Fusion-io with their amazing speed and benchmarks were there enticing decision makers to test out their ioMemory and ioDrives. There was another young company, Virident, that looks like it may give Fusion-io a run for their money.

As the Community Manager, I had a goal to talk about the advantages of our open source software and try my best to tell attendees about our architecture. Oftentimes, I had approximately twenty seconds to do so, and I felt like I was successful. Though there were quite a few people I did not get a chance to speak with, of those with whom I did, the response was incredibly positive and even more so, exciting. I was impressed with the amount of knowledge that some people did have about our technology as well as excited to talk to those who knew little to none. Something else that I did find impressive though was the amount of energy in the room. There was certainly a high level of enthusiasm that felt good to be around, which I felt made for a great expo.

Overall, I found the conference to be hugely beneficial to the community because of the networking that it offered and a chance to identify new use cases with more companies. Amongst the hoopla, I was able to get a moment to walk through with my laptop and create a video of a few of the booths and talk with some of the exhibitors, so take a quick look when you get a chance. I cannot say that I did not have a lot of fun, because I certainly did, as well as get a chance to carry forward the message about our incredible architecture. Big "Ups" to Infobright for their decisions in bringing this technology to where we are and where we are going. See you guys in Portland at Oscon 2012...