Did I push to much in my last post? I don’t think so, but I guess it’s a fragile balance sometimes in Open Source between those keen end users, and the developers that do give so much towards their own creations (I understand, I’m in that category myself).

I was very proud of my work yesterday, it took a whole day of my time (I do have better things to do, like finish my own Open Source project HTMLtags, while will allow me to build my sample application, which I can then use for my MySQL Users Conference presentation). I learnt to dig around the net a lot, go on the wild goose chase several times, understand some more under the hoods of compiling, libraries and dependencies in the GTK world I would have otherwise not really cared about. But as I said, I got to a brick wall by the end, and it was dishearting.

It …

One of the great benefits of Open Source, it’s Free, and you can get great support, sometimes even from the developers directly (rather then 5 levels of paid customer support for a commercial product). One of the greatest banes of Open Source, if you have a problem, and nobody has experienced and documented in a forum etc the problem you have with the same OS, libraries etc, you could be totally up the creek without a paddle, boat and for that matter water. (luckily you still have oxgyen)

Well, I’m having this problem with MySQL Workbench. A product promising so much, but if you can’t get the binary working on Linux to even start, where do you go.

You will see via the Forums, I’m not the only person. This is the current …

I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. I’ve been using DBDesigner 4 from FabForce, an open source visual design tool, and apart from working around a number of bugs, I’ve found it practical to design from scratch. The big plus, it works under Linux.

With the announcement that this was being incorporated into MySQL, called MySQL Workbench, I was looking forward to getting my hands on it. I guess that was about 8 months ago. Finally about 6 weeks ago, Version 1.0.0-alpha was released for Linux. Unfortunately it didn’t work, would not even start for me. Logged as Bug #15421, which got marked as a duplicate of …

Would it not be great if on the MySQL website there was a page of stats (updated daily) that provided statistics like number of installations, a breakdown of versions registered (not certain I like that exact word) , OS’s, countries etc. More specifically, some useful stats on the engine types in practical use, avg number of tables per database etc. Of course the types of stats could be limitless, but with the success of MySQL as well as other open source projects, more imperial figures on installations other then just downloads I think would definitely benefit given the current momentum. (Availability of information to competitors could be both a good and bad thing.) Perhaps figures can be shown in percentages, not actual numbers.

Anyway, nice idea you say, we can all come up with ideas, but how could you implement something like this. …

GPLv3 Draft ? GPLv3

It’s there for you to take a read. I’ve just read through it and it does sound like a good improvement. I would certainly feel happy licensing my code under this license.

It’s also good to know that MySQL has been and will be further involved in the process (as are many other orgs and companies).

ticketmaster.com.au - The White Stripes

Damn, damn, damn, damn damn. Only January 28th - and I’m in NZ.

Note to future organisers: make sure dates don’t overlap BDO or any really cool band tour dates.

Of course, the real disaster would be if Tool were touring at the same time as a work thing. How will people take it if i leave a company event for however long is needed to see Tool live. as many times as possible. I am dearly hoping that travel co-ordinates itself to see them in different cities, countries. Heck, even another planet if we can do that by the time the new album is ready :)

Some people don’t seem to get the Tool thing. It’s just good music. But that’s the …

It wasn’t that long ago that MySQL released the GA Release of Version 5.0 with major new features (Oct 24 2005). It still took 5.0 about a year to go from alpha to GA, however I’d suspect a much shorter turnaround this time.

Version 5.1 is already at alpha, and the largest public functionality mentioned has been Partitioning. It is also anticipated that Storage Engines (a very handy MySQL feature in comparison to other RDBS products), will be a hot-pluggable API instead of a source re-compilation. Now I’ve never even looked at the Storage Engine code, but it’s been talked about a few …

In a recent job interview I was asked the question regarding Unit Testing/Automated Testing of a Database? An interesting question and indeed an interesting problem. I thought it was a good topic to describe what I’ve done in the past, and where I would go for a more complete testing environment given the opportunity of a entire XP project.

This is the approach I have implemented successfully in the past. It’s not a complete solution, however at the time with the client it provided appropriate coverage.

I don’t use a framework such as dbUnit to load data via XML, or specifically test data. XML is ugly to store data, and also with maintenance and comparison. I start with a pre-configured database of representative sample data, refer to my notes later on this, and then I use the tests of the application to perform the necessary data …

So it seems that my original plan of just a few RCs for MDB2 did not go through. I am now at RC4. I have spend alot of time over christmas just reading the source up and down. That way I found a number of bugs and ugly spots that I fixed within those 4 RCs.

Also I am very happy that most PEAR developers have accepted my patches to add MDB2 support. This means that soon most PEAR packages should provide MDB2 support. Especially Mark Wiesemann has been very helpful in prodiving feedback and patches as he was expanding my original patches for DB_Table. This has helped alot in finding little bugs as well problem in the way we were handling the "seqname_format" and "idxname_format" option with legacy databases not created with MDB2.

I encourage everyone to play around with MDB2 so that we can uncover any potential internal deficiencies that may still lurk somewhere in the code. I am really trying to solve all kinks that might lead to BC …

Gojira est mort... Vive Gojira.

Yesterday morning, I discovered that the machine this site used to run on had quietly gone belly-up sometime during the night - it seems that the system drive and the disk controller ate themselves, or ate each other, or some such thing. Fortunately, the drive that all the site files and databases lived on survived. So after shuffling some bits around and a fun-filled day installing the operating system, Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc. and recreating all the lost configs, Gojira lives again. The old Gojira was an 800 MHz Celeron with 384 MB memory, and the new one is only a 433 MHz Pentium-3, but it's got 768 MB RAM, and actually runs loads faster. I've also got my eye on a couple of machines at the local hockshop that are faster, and with the spare RAM from the Gojira That Was, I could come close to matching my deaktop (a 2.8 GHz P-4 with a gig of memory) for less than AU$500, I think. In any case, I've come to the …