Truth in advertising: I'm easily swayed by Monica Kumar. Monica is director of Oracle's Open Source Program Office, is very smart, and actually fun to talk with.

(This last thing should not be underestimated. I remain of the mind that people prefer to do business with nice people, not jerks. On that score, I also have to admit mea culpa for casting Oracle with a broad "jerk" brush. The funny thing is, everyone I know there now, I like. So, maybe Oracle isn't a mean, bullying company after all.... :-)

Anyway, I bumped into Monica at Novell's BrainShare conference this week in Utah. She gave me a few CDs for the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition and suggested I actually try it out, instead of …

As the open source business ecosystem grows and matures, I'm finding it increasingly important for me to not only pitch my company's paid version, but also others'. Were I true Adam Smith, I'd argue that

...every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to …

I was trying to find an old article at Planet MySQL. One about a MySQL UDF to write to /var/log/messages. No luck.

Anyway, there is no search option on the site, and the latest addition of 10 entries per page makes it difficult to review pages. The RSS feed doesn’t give me a full option.

Anyway, it led me to look back in time to just how many articles are listed on Planet MySQL, and read some old stuff. I only came across it after I stumbled across the Brisbane MySQL Users Group back in Sep 2005.

Anyway the count was 2146. I’d like to see a stat on the home page of how many articles, and perhaps how many, last day, last week, last month.

I was reading Zack Urlocker’s MySQL Workbench Beta article and was keen to look at the Extensible architecture. Not much detail yet in the Figure Stylesheets, Scripts and Plugins, which will be good when it’s there, however it lead me to another secret.

The MySQL Forge. This was mentioned at the Brisbane MySQL Users Group Meeting with Brian Aker in January. There isn’t much content at present, but there is a Call for Content.

• Register your favorite projects
• Create a Wiki article
• …

Another slightly disappointing article regarding MySQL, this one from a printed magazine. Below are my comments to the editor of Linux Format. The Dear Editor is an email link should others wish to make any comments. (Previous article comments What makes your blood boil?, Review of Database Magazine Article - ?The Usual Suspects?)

Dear Editor,

I’ve recently subscribed to LXF, and have generally been very happy with the content in past months. I’m disappointed in your recent LXF77 article “Harness a database” Pg 57. Being a strong MySQL supporter, your article includes a number of practices which are less then ideal, and especially for the newly initiated, overly complicated when simplier alternatives exist.

I am happy to see that you had the …

I'm pretty excited about my next few weeks. I suppose one of the perks of my job is getting to attend and sometimes speak at a variety of conferences in the open source development world. Next week, I will be in Santa Clara for EclipseCon 2006. At this conference, I plan on filling in the large gaps of knowledge inside my brain regarding the Eclipse platform and IDE and meeting with a number of key Eclipse Foundation folks and Andi Gutmans from Zend. Stay tuned for some very important announcements tyhis week from MySQL AB and Eclipse.

I will be at the conference from the 21st through the 24th of March, so find me when I am there if you will also be at the conference. I want to meet as many Eclipse users as I can, so that I can get a better picture of how developers use the platform, what they see are the key …

I will be attending EclipseCon 2006 in Santa Clara, California, next week. It's an exciting thing for me for a number of reasons:

• MySQL Has Become a Member of the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In Provider

  Yes, that's right. MySQL AB has officially become a member of the Eclipse Foundation this week. We will be devoting development resources to participation in 2 Eclipse projects that will be of great benefit to the MySQL Community.

• The Eclipse Data Tools Project is wickedly cool

  Basically, the DTP is developing Visual Database Tools like TOAD and DBArtisan. You will get all the familiar database tools (e.g. SQL Editor, SQL Debugger, SQL Browser, etc.)

  We will make sure that all the excellent tools from the DTP …

As part of my A call to arms! post about a month ago, I’ve had a number of unofficial comments of support. In addition, I’ve also been approached to assist in the completion of a MySQL Transactional support engine. More information on the PBXT engine will be forthcoming soon by it’s creator.

Anyway, I’ve taken on the responsiblity of assisting in testing this new storage engine. This will also give me the excuse of being able to pursue some other ideas about the performance of differing storage engines for differing tables in business circumstances, such as MyIsam verses InnoDB in a highly OLTP environment. Part of testing will be ensure ACID conformance in varying situations and multi-concurrency use. Of course the ability to also do performance and load testing would be a obvious extension.

Considering how I’m going to benchmark is an interesting …

Apache JMeter is a 100% pure Java desktop application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions. Specifically it provides complete support for database testing via JDBC.

Some References: Homepage http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/  ·  Wiki Page  ·  User Manual

Initial Installation Steps

$ su -
$ cd /opt
$ wget http://apache.planetmirror.com.au/dist/jakarta/jmeter/binaries/jakarta-jmeter-2.1.1.tgz
$ wget …

Some recent posts regarding Oracle (See Smart moves by MySQL AB and Larry Ellison still doesn’t understand open source) leads me to put in my 2 cents worth.

My background I’m sure like a lot of experienced MySQL people is in Oracle, and indeed in Ingres before that (starting in 1988). I have also worked for a number of years at Oracle Corporation. Ironically I started as their resident Ingres Specialist, in an international research project of DMS (Design & Migration Services) of re-engineering Ingres applications into an Oracle Designer Repository some 10 years ago in 1996. I of course moved into a number of other Oracle roles for clients following that. I still retain some …