In case you haven't heard, Linus Torvalds had a bit of a rant at the GNOME developers regarding quality user interfaces. In the course of the exchange, certain nasty words and comments were thrown about — to put it nicely.

Now, I'm by no means a saint, and every once in a while I might get my knickers in a twist about something or other, but this kind of behaviour, on both sides of the coin by various folk, does nothing to further the FOSS movement. In fact, it deeply hurts it. Why? Well, for one thing, the black & white back-and-forth bantering which inevitably follows such outbursts (like this recent well-meaning post that turned into comments about the age-old PostgreSQL/MySQL debate) does little to inspire confidence in …

While this may be old hat to those of you out there who, like me, regularly scour through the source code commits on the internals (and newly forked commits) lists, however, in the past few weeks, a couple of documentation and code commits have caught my attention. Things catch my attention for any number of reasons. Most often, the commits that I flag for a later look at are those things which I suspected would change in the near future when I wrote chapters of Pro MySQL that dealt with the source code, architecture and storage engines. Other times, I catch something about a particular bug that I've run into has been fixed. Other times, I just notice some really cool idea that's going into the code and decide to investigate. Of course, besides the few things below, there …

Flexible, Scalable Key Mapping Solutions

In working to answer questions on the MySQL forums, I've noticed a few questions that repeatedly come up on a number of the forum areas. One of these particular questions deals with how to manage -- construct, query, and maintain -- many to many relationships in your schema. I decided to put together a two-part article series detailing some of the common dilemmas which inevitably arise when tackling the issue of relating two entities where one entity can be related to many instances of another, and vice versa.

Hopefully, this article will shed some light on how to structure your schema effectively to produce fast, efficient queries, and also will illustrate how key map tables can be queried for a variety of different purposes. I'll predominantly be using standard SQL, so although I'm using MySQL as the database of choice here, …

Who has the most downloads? Mozilla FireFox, with MySQL not far behind. (Thanks for pointing out the picture, Zack.) Here's the chart from the WSJ:

Now, keep in mind that this chart doesn't include all major open source projects (the article in which it appeared focuses on Sun) - no Linux there, nor Apache. But I think it's interesting to see who has volume.

More interesting, though, is what companies are doing with that volume. MySQL is on a $40 million run-rate for this year, last time I checked. The big question for them (and for every commercial open source provider) is how to turn downloads into dollars. That is, how to improve conversion rates.

MySQL had some 10 million downloads (give or take 2 million) in 2003. It also had ~$10 million in revenue. That's (very) roughly $1/download. (See Christof Wittig's excellent Stanford GSB paper …

Roland Bouman sent me an email yesterday alerting me to an idea presented by Giuseppe Maxia on the MySQL Stored Procedures forum a couple days ago. The idea, in a nutshell, is to create a repository or library of tuned and tested MySQL stored procedures, similar to something like CPAN for Perl modules.

Frankly, I think it's a great idea. A project like this, given a good head of steam, would propel the movement of MySQL 5 into the mainstream and encourage hosting companies and others to adopt the newer technology. If there is enough demand for this kind of thing (which I think there would be, considering both the hype about MySQL 5 and the communities on the web alrady set up for other RDBMS vendors who support stored procedures) it will force …

This month's Linux Magazine development article was written by Mike Kruckenberg and I. It covers aspects of MySQL 5, including stored procedures, views, and triggers. It was actually quite fun writing the article. We chose to use Python and MySQL to build a simple stock-tracking application that takes advantage of openly available web services, some nifty Python packages, and of course, MySQL's newest features.

Mike and I plan on doing a follow up article (if Martin Streicher at Linux Mag will have us do it again!) on the other new features of MySQL 5 sometime soon. Also featured in this month's article is an interview with Mårten Micklos, MySQL's CEO, which I'm very interested in reading. Well, I guess it's off to the bookstore to purchase my own copy...

I was asked a few questions by a reporter thru a collegue, here is an extract of the discussion.

1) Based on your initial experience with Oracle Database Express Edition, what are your initial thoughts on the product in terms of meeting developer needs?

Installing Oracle 10g Express Edition was a breeze. (Article). In the past Oracle products have been more difficult to install, however this has gradually improved with the more recent version releases of 8i, 9i and 10g. This easy installation via rpm under Linux, in particular the inclusion of HTMLDB provides an ideal database environment that is functional in just a few minutes. This is an important first step in gaining initial developer support.

With the database installation, the Web Based HTMLDB Interface and a sound amount of developer articles online at the Oracle Technology Network ( …

As I mentioned earlier, is MySQL a target of the new Oracle 10g Express Edition. Maybe not specifically, but let’s assume it’s on the radar screen. What can Oracle do to woe MySQL users and developers?

I see distinct marketing will be required for Oracle 10g Express Edition, marketing for example to existing partners must be different to “Competitor Marketing”. While I’m sure Oracle will now be able to get benefits from Parters trying to sell their products, now being able to reduce costs to customers (at least initially). Other partners that never considered selling developed applications due to the license cost may now reconsider.

But back onto MySQL. Oracle needs to target specific information to MySQL. …

Just where is Oracle planning on targeting the new Oracle 10g Express Edition?
The obvious answer would be to counter the arch nemesis Microsoft, and the low end product offerings, like the MS SQL Server and the low end free engine MSDE. I didn’t realise to recently, that Microsoft have finally released the next version of MS SQL Server, being 2005, and at the same time provide a free cut down offering, strangely enough called “Express Edition”. It’s taken Microsoft 5 years. Makes you wonder if Database Technology is a high priority!

Is Oracle also now threatened in anyway by MySQL? I think not, however the continued growth of MySQL, it’s availability on any Linux server and in many distros, and now …

In Dave's last harangue (no, the one that came after spanking Shai @ SAP), he asks:

I think SugarCRM is proving that replacing proprietary apps is really not that big of a deal, but does the world need 5 more open source CRM companies?My answer? Absolutely.

SugarCRM is helping to level-set expectations of what is really needed in a CRM system, and what it should cost [Note: I'm on SugarCRM's advisory board.]. Same with Alfresco in Enterprise Content Management [Note: I work for Alfresco], JBoss in application servers, MySQL in databases, etc. Some might call it commodification, or lowering the bar. I …