Now I want to be Sarah Lacy's biggest fan. (Eat your heart out, Dave.) Sarah politely tells me that I'm waffling on calling a spade a spade.

Or, in this case, a weak open source play a "weak open source play."

It started with the Ingres announcement, but it's really much more than that. There's a thought out there, as Sarah captures in her thoughtful blog post, that being "the open source alternative" is enough. Get out the gate first, as Dave has argued, and you win. Quoth Dave:

Open source is an interesting animal in that first-mover advantage seems to turn …

In lunching with an old Oracle Friend, the topic turned to Oracle 10g Express Edition, and we discussed the pros and cons for organisations. The first thing he asked me was, “Have you tried loading the database larger then the 4G limit yet”. Some People?

In general the consensus seemed that it was viable for a small organisation, good for a startup company to get into a no cost entry solution, but appealing to those venture capitalists as you have a definite growth pattern.

I’m warming to more actively pursing Oracle 10g Express Edition, especially with HTMLDB, and at present while preparing to submit a paper for an upcoming Open Source conference which I hope is accepted, I’ve allocated some time on the significant topic of Open Source Verses Free. Stay tuned.

It dawned on me later in the day to more closely investigate the Oracle RPM installation and where exactly everything went in the FileSystem. I was surprised …

I have been fairly negative on technology lately, partially because I am fed up with marketing hype (even my own) and partially because I am back as an end-user and consumer of IT products and services. I've also been languishing with the notion that many open source startups are grossly overestimating their potential market size. Then, as I was reading Matt's Finally a real database market, I realized that I was looking at it all wrong--limiting the market opportunity by the relative size that exists now.

The right metric isn't proprietary vs. open, but open vs. open where Microsoft either joins in or gets left behind.

Of databases and enterprise class
I keep wondering why the standard line is to claim MySQL is not enterprise class. Why don't people say that about …

Market: the world of commercial activity where goods and services are bought and sold) "without competition there would be no market"....

Thus spake WordNet. The denotation doesn't state that there must be multiple vendors to make a market, but I think the implication/connotation is there. Whoever heard of a market with just one player? Besides the office productivity suite market, that is. :-)

And so, we heard yesterday that CA is spinning off Ingres to form an independent company. (With a great person - Dave Dargo - to run it. I knew Dave when he was at Oracle, then Olliance. He's a huge asset to the Ingres team.)

My friend and alter-ego, …

I was tinkering a bit with integrating Wordpress and Gallery2 and in the process posted some photos from a trip to Prague I took earlier this year as part of a MySQL developer conference. If all works well, you can click the image below to see them:

Ok, lets start this post with the standard disclaimer about my opinions being my own, and not those of MySQL AB. Why? Because there's controversy afoot.

So what's happening Mike?

Well, dear reader, MySQL AB has gone and added another platform to the list of platforms that we build binaries for. Users of that platform will not only find binaries for their platform, they will also get a trial subscription to MySQL Network to help them use their shiny new MySQL server!

That does not sound so bad, where's the controversy?

Well, depending on who you are, there may be no controversy at all. You see, a press release was made last Friday announcing that the platform in question is SCO Openserver 6.

This has produced a variety of responses, several interesting examples of which can be found …

I just got the word from my manager that I'm going to OSCON this year. Whee! I've been wanting to go since '98, and it seems that this is the first time I'm going to be able to make it. I'm looking forward to it.

Aah vacation, a time when married men spend 8 hours a day doing the whim of their wife instead of their company. My vacation started yesterday (or last Friday if you count the Canadian national holiday), and so far I have taken in a parade and done little else.

One thing I am working on is a time tracker tool for myself. I wanted something that was simple that I could develop as a practice project which would be of use to me:

In essence it will be a simple Open Source time tracker/punchclock tool. I am using VB.NET with MySQL 5, SQL trees for managing the project hierarchy, and a nice helping of views, stored procedures, and the like.

This should be handy for keeping track of what I do in a given week, where my time goes, and what I have accomplished. So far I can punch in and out of existing projects, and delete events that …

As you may recall, I have started a new project to create a new MySQL User Guide oriented at users who are new to SQL or who know SQL but are new to MySQL.

Well, I have a chapter on indexing done and I would love to have some people review it. Mainly I am looking for people who fit into the profile I just mentioned. The indexing chapter is only about 8 pages so it should not take too much time.

Please email mike (at) thisdomain if you are interested.

Zend recently decided to not call themselves the creators of PHP anymore. This change in Zend’s marketing has been long overdue. It caused friction with some PHP core developers over the past years that spread into the PHP community.

Others also make mistakes

It is not that Zend is the only company in the Open Source market that made some marketing mistakes in the past. MySQL for example had their CTO Monty Widenius talk fancier then usual in an internally conducted interview and the answers did not sound like he really said them. It made known members of the MySQL community wonder who kidnapped Monty.

Sex sells?

To some marketing experts, the Open Source community might seem like a …