I’ve read at times people complaining about the response to bugs, and people bag the support of MySQL on the forums at times.

Well today I logged a bug, not the first and I’m sure it’s not the last. See LAST_INSERT_ID() does not return results for a problem in the latest Connector/J 5.0.3 that was released just recently.

Now it took me about 2 hours to log the bug, and probably at least 2 hours of frustration prior to that. The initial frustration 2 hours was unsuccessful debugging of what I was sure was valid code (and it was near midnight last night). The second 2 hours today was testing the problem between two environments, different database versions and different Connector/J versions, and providing a simple reproducable case of said problem.

So the timeline of the …

Some years ago (as penance for working at MySQL during some temporary corporate brain-damage about Free Software licensing) I began volunteering at the Free Software Foundation.

For the most part, I have spent my time providing support on Free Software licensing questions for the FSF Compliance Lab and helping out on the GPL v3 effort.

While both activities are quite rewarding, the work at the compliance lab tends to be most interesting. We serve a wide variety of people and organizations who have a correspondingly wide range of experience, views and questions. This leads to rewarding experiences, as well as experiences that are more …

Earlier this week I delivered a presentation at OSCON 2006 entitled "Making Sales While Making Friends: Lessons Learned from Open Source Businesses." I've been involved with commercial open source since 1998, and have learned a lot over the years (including how to fail spectacularly and slightly more gracefully). I'm in the middle of a string of successes, though, and figured now was the time to pretend to know-it-all. You can view my OSCON 2006 presentation here. It was an extension of some JBoss analysis I did recently, as well as an attempt to pass on some of the lessons I've learned so that the next round of open source …

Damian Conway is giving the funniest public flogging I have ever seen. He is single-handedly kicking the ass of Web 2.0, Sxip, patents, patent vulture firms, snake oil crypto, Microsoft, Google, r0ml and all the rest of us all at the same time.

Great quotes include:

• We have a patent on replacing the letter in a name with x, but still pronouncing it the same way.
• Every time you read the name Microsoft, you will see a kitten. We call it “Pavlovian Marketing”
• We thought that we might call it … firefly, fireangel, firebuffy. Then it became obvious - the new browser is called FireWhedon.

I sure hope that O’Reilly recorded this session.

Update 1

I just registered cxap.{biz,net,org} - now to go ask Damian what he would …

In case you missed the news, Greenplum and Sun have teamed up to deliver a monster of a business intelligence/data warehousing appliance. What's it called? Well, that's the downside: "The Data Warehouse Appliance." If you're still awake after reading the name, you'll still be blown away by the performance (and the price). Those, at least, are interesting: capable of scanning 1 terabyte of data in 60 seconds and can easily scale to hundreds of terabytes of usable database capacity (10-50X performance boost over the Terradata/etc. competition).

What will it run you? Well, you won't find it at CompUSA, but it's pretty cheap (relative to the competition) all the same. From the press release:

Initial configurations will deliver usable database capacities of 10, 40 and 100TB. Pricing for the 40TB and 100TB configurations …

I'm listening to Scott Yara talk about Greenplum's commercialization of the PostgreSQL database, and comparing it to what Paul Weinstein (EVP, Business Development, MySQL). I had always viewed the two projects - MySQL and PostgreSQL - as direct competitors, and figured both were also competing with DB2 and Oracle. This is clearly not the case, at least, not for these two companies.

Who does MySQL compete with? With no one. Marten is on the record as saying that

We continue to have most of our deployments in areas where there was no database before. Either the application didn't use a database earlier, or the application is new. We are now seeing more and more migrations from old …

Fabrizio has one of the best posts I've yet seen on open source licensing. It's one of the most candid posts I've ever seen on open source licensing (and candor is something all software companies need - open and closed).

Fabrizio traces the contours of open source licensing, honing in on dual licensing strategies. He astutely observes that a dual-license strategy works well for MySQL (or a product that is embeddable), because there the "trigger" is clear: you either pay your way out of the GPL (or similarly restrictive license) or you contribute code back. Simple.

Open source applications, as Fabrizio notes, are different. There is no obvious trigger (You'll need to read Fabrizio's post to discover the non-obvious trigger that he comes up with) for either contributing back or buying. So what do you do?

In Alfresco's case, …

OK, so OSCON is one of, if not the, largest open source conference in the world. The complete list of sessions and tutorials is staggering. So, for those of you Sakila fans heading out to Portland for the "big gig" next week, I figured I would highlight the MySQL sessions and tutorials and also give my top 6 picks of the sessions you simply shouldn't miss.

MySQL Related

• Monday has both my own "Maximum Velocity MySQL" (on performance tuning and coding) and Brian's "MySQL 5.1 In-Depth" tutorials. Note that Brian is also giving …

At OSCON next week, I'm giving a presentation entitled Making Sales While Making Friends: Lessons Learned from Open Source Businesses. I'm in the middle of preparing it, and also reflecting on some conversations I had earlier this week with sales executives from MySQL, Red Hat, JasperSoft, and SugarCRM.

In the course of those conversations, I was surprised by how differently we supposedly similar open source companies run our operations. We're each an open source company, but with varying licensing, sales, and support models. That's a good thing.

But it's also a perplexing thing if you're trying to weave together a common theme between them.

After our meeting, I spent some time on Sourceforge, pulling download data and correlating it to company revenues for these and other open source companies. After awhile, similarities started to …

OK, so next week is OSCON, in case you hadn't heard... I will be presenting a tutorial entitled Maximum Velocity MySQL on Monday morning, from 8:30am until noon, in room Portland 255. The tutorial will cover advanced SQL, schema and index strategies, and performance tuning topics, with lots of code examples and demonstrations. It should be a great time, and there'll be lots of giveaways, so be sure to check it out.

Additionally, there is a MySQL BoF session scheduled for Thursday evening from 8pm to 9pm in room D135. We'll be providing pizza (and probably beer if we can get our hands on some). I will be there along with Arjen and likely Brian as well. We hope to have discussions with …