The topic at hand is Oracle buying one dual license open source company after another. This is getting a lot of people worried. Of course it also got me thinking.

Dual licensing is a business model associated with companies distributing their code under two very different licenses. One license is a classic proprietary license. It usually includes all the goodies like warranties and the right to embed the code into own proprietary code without any additional requirements.

However the same code is also provided through some open source license, usually one of the so called reciprocal licenses (GPL and friends). Reciprocal means that these licenses require that any code that is linked with …

With Oracle Corporation purchasing InnoBase, the company providing the InnoDB Storage Engine, and now reliable rumors of the acquisition of SleepyCat, the BDB Storage Engine, both key transactional storage engines for MySQL are effectively owned by a competitor.

While the is a strange and probably unchartered territory for both organisations, I’m personally concerned. I use InnoDB extensively, however if there was a comparable alternative within MySQL I’d consider switching out of principle. Is Oracle purchasing these organisations a bad thing? We don’t know. That’s the problem. While MySQL will undoubtly continue to provide these storage engines as part of the MySQL Database I believe a call to arms is needed.

It’s true that Oracle helped more general adoption of Linux …

Last year saw a record number of acquisitions by Oracle Corporation. Of note was in October 2005 InnoBase (Read Press Release) which had a direct relationship with MySQL providing the InnoDB Storage Engine. It’s too early to tell what the impact to MySQL will be if any.

I’ve been in Singapore, and have not read any news in the past few days, but all information I’m receiving from those collegues in the know is that Sleepycat Software (the company behind Berkley DB, and the MySQL BDB Storage Engine) is now firmly in the sites of Oracle Acquisition. The rumors of JBoss is also definitely on the …

I was talking to a friend at a party (I know it sounds pathetic, but we also talked about non work related stuff) about a java banking application he is working on. The application needs to run with whatever RDBMS is already installed at the client. He noted that they have the most trouble with IBM DB2. He did speak favorably about Apache Derby aka IBM cloudspace, but then again he actually likes java, so go figure ;-)

One of the issues is that appearently DB2 is so configurable that it becomes very difficult to be able to determine if the queries will even run at the clients site. I guess you can configure all sorts of buffers and thresholds that if set too aggressively will simply prevent their application from running at all. Now you could say thats the DBA's fault. But the fact of the matter is that they are trying to sell an application and it does not help things if this requires the DBA to change parameters that affect other …

But there are still a few things to do before it can go stable. I reworked the client and admin roadmap the other day. I moved a couple items to a post 1.0.0 release. Specifically I moved the cache advances, session abstraction and expanded perm XML container. However if anyone steps up who has an immediate need for these features and does significant code contributions, these features could still of course be fast tracked to be included into 1.0.0 stable.

However even with this "reduction" in 1.0.0 scope, we still have a fair bit of work ahead of us. Obviously there are the usual bug fixes. I just fixed a few issues in the LiveUser_Admin_Storage layer were we dynamically generate the SQL to make our API so flexible. People really seem to be pushing the API more and more when I look at what …

For the geeky folks running a non-windows operating system on a windows system, what are you using, why, and do you like it?

I just found colinux, which looks good, and I’m installing mysql on it now. I’ve used cygwin and it’s just a pig, and things don’t work so well there.

VMware costs $$, and also isn’t really great either (I’ve had stability problems). What do folks think about these three?

Its done! After more than 2,5 years pondering on the design decisions in MDB we finally have a successor MDB2 with a first stable. Along with it the ibase, mysql, mysqli, mssql, pgsql, sqlite drivers have been marked stable.

In the past months a lot of people (Lorenzo, Helgi, David, Matthias and many others) have helped iron out the last issues, expand the test suite to uncover issues lurking within. Most PEAR packages support MDB2 and through the integration with these packages MDB2 matured as well. Of course there are still things to work on, but its good that we have made this milestone, because now users can rely on the MDB2 development team to maintain backwards compatibility.

Users interested in MDB2 should check out the wiki dedicated to …

Yesterday I ran into an old collegue that now runs quite a successful computer store chain and highly successful web store here in Australia. Long story short he was having some MySQL problems, so I offered to pass my eye over it. Now, given that they had some data corruption in stock levels not being correct (e.g. getting to an inventory count of -1), my first split second thought was inappropiate transaction management.

In thinking last night, what would I do as part of auditing an existing MySQL Installation and application quickly for reference and also to highlight issues etc, assuming I would have no access to any administrators or developers.

So what would you do? I made some preliminary notes, here’s the full account of what I did do.

Audit Steps

OS Specifics

$ mkdir /tmp/arabx
$ cd /tmp/arabx
# keep a quick copy of stuff
$ script
# Linux generals
$ hostname
$ uname -a
$ uptime
$ …

These are my first impressions of MySQL WorkBench 1.0.1. Rant and rave you may say, but a new user, or an experienced modeller would probably observe these points. Also, given that (with a poll?) I suspect a good number of users will be previous DBDesigner users, some level of functionality that may not be considered initially in a new product, should be considered for this migration path of legacy users.

I’ll take the time to review the Forums adding my points, and review Bug System but for now, just blogging is easier.

Conclusion

Note: Generally a conclusion is at the bottom, but I’d suspect most readers will switch off …

A long while ago I added a seemingly idiotic feature to MDB2: The ability to disable the execution of queries.

The idea was that with the combination of a debug handler it would be possible for people to create a dump of SQL queries generated by MDB2_Schema during the installation or updating of a schema. All you would need to do is write up a debug handler for MDB2. Finally you would set the "disable_query" parameter when calling MDB2_Schema::updateDatabase() to true.

<?php
function dump_to_file(&$db, $scope, $message, $is_manip)
{
    if ($is_manip) {
        $fp = fopen('dump.sql', 'a');
        fwrite($fp, $message."\n");
        fclose($fp);
    }
}

$dsn = 'mysql://root:@localhost/foo';

// customize MDB2_SCHEMA configuration options as needed
$options = array(
    'debug' => true,
    'portability' => (MDB2_PORTABILITY_ALL ^ MDB2_PORTABILITY_EMPTY_TO_NULL),
    'debug_handler' => 'dump_to_file',
);

$manager =& …