I am not interest in your software patent pledges. I want you to freaken burn them, I want you to freaken stop lobbying for this crap and I want you instead to lobby to ban their very existence. So I am very much in agreement with Florian Müller's (who has been working hard in cooperation with MySQL to prevent a legitimization of software patents in Europe) assessment of the state of affairs.

I do not buy into the thought that patents, especially in the software industry do anything for innovation. Would any software company really stop investing in innovation? I think not. The software industry is moving too fast. Its about being the first mover and for most of us innovation is just part of our day to day lives as we solve real customer needs.

We do not have time to write up shady crap that covers everything and says nothing. We …

I recently finished the first stage of a new chapter for the MySQL reference manual to help developers write their own custom storage engines.

The chapter is now online at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/custom-engine.html and, while being pre-release documentation regarding pre-release functionality, it will hopefully be of use to anyone looking to write their own storage engine.

In the next few weeks I hope to improve the existing work and add information on implementing indexing, transactions, and other advanced storage engine features.

While reading http://www.futhark.ch/mysql/109.html, at first I thought by “add to set” they meant “add to the definition set”. Wouldn’t it be great to have an easy command to alter the table and change the enum or set definitions? Is there something like that?

may have already noticed this. But I changed the CAPTCHA in my blog from the rather obnoxious and very hard to read image generated by the code I picked up from the PEAR::Text_CAPTCHA sample to a fairly simple math problem. It seems to hold off spam well for now. Expect the math problem to increase in difficulty once I get spam (or stupid comments) but for now all is well. Now even Wez should be able to solve it on first try :-)

I have also added a FSFE fellow button. I have actually been a FSFE fellow since LinuxTag this summer and I cannot stress enough how important the work of the FSFE is to ensure that open source can stand up to …

Late last year I bought a Dell Inspiron 9200 laptop for my work machine while on the road. It was a fine machine, plenty powerful to run all the tools I need to document MySQL.

The laptop came with a two-edged sword — the 1920×1200 WUXGA screen had awesome resolution, allowing one to work on so many windows at once it was practically like having dual monitors. The disadvantage was that the screen had a lowsy anti-glare coating that produced a sparkle effect when your viewing angle shifted, which can be read about with this Google search.

I first thought this was just the way the screen was and dealt with it, but it later became apparent that this screen was sub-standard compared to …

Someone at work today pointed out a podcast from Tom Kyte (a fountain of Oracle knowledge who‘s really hooked into his user community) of Oracle that covers Oracle 10g XE (their “free” product).

Both Tom Kyte and Oracle use Feedburner to deliver their podcasts and other RSS feeds (a great service btw, I use their application to deliver my blog‘s RSS feed as well, plus they‘re in Chicago, so I‘ve visited with their folks a few times).

What I find ironic is that Feedburner uses MySQL and Connector/J to power their service ;)

Someone at work today pointed out a podcast from Tom Kyte (a fountain of Oracle knowledge who's really hooked into his user community) of Oracle that covers Oracle 10g XE (their "free" product).

Both Tom Kyte and Oracle use Feedburner to deliver their podcasts and other RSS feeds (a great service btw, I use their application to deliver my blog's RSS feed as well, plus they're in Chicago, so I've visited with their folks a few times).

What I find ironic is that Feedburner uses MySQL and Connector/J to power their service ;)

Someone at work today pointed out a podcast from Tom Kyte (a fountain of Oracle knowledge who‘s really hooked into his user community) of Oracle that covers Oracle 10g XE (their “free” product).

Both Tom Kyte and Oracle use Feedburner to deliver their podcasts and other RSS feeds (a great service btw, I use their application to deliver my blog‘s RSS feed as well, plus they‘re in Chicago, so I‘ve visited with their folks a few times).

What I find ironic is that Feedburner uses MySQL and Connector/J to power their service ;)

Well, the sample database has not yet been released, but that is not stopping Roland Bouman from using it to demonstrate crosstab queries.

Good to see some use coming of the effort put forth so far.

it’s annoying. grr.

but, on the other hand, I am speaking about MySQL 5.0 at OSDC.

This is even cooler as 5.0 has gone GA. So it’s not “upcoming features” it’s the “here and now”.

I’ll now have to release MemberDB 0.4 (the MySQL release). Converting the Linux Australia installation over at some point soon too. The 0.4 tree fixes enough bugs that it’s worth it (one of which Pia found the other day).