In an internal mail thread, I was asked whether there would be any “objections from an integration perspective” to some Sun initiated plans for a more organised French MySQL community.

My reply was that it’s great, if it’s something related to the self-organisation of the already very active French MySQL community (as witnessed for instance by the huge numbers that Véronique Loquet of Al’x Communication attracted to our Paris meetup in April). But if it’s about a centrally-imposed structure of “marketing towards the user base”, then I want to understand more and we need to discuss a bit further.

Based …

Here’s an update on Ivan’s status, both from a medical and contributions perspective. Three days ago, I wrote that Ivan has arrived in Germany. Instead of posting all my news on Ivan as new posting each time, I will at irregular intervals keep this page up to date.

Andrii, Ivan and the rest of the family have now started settling in in Heidelberg. Georg Richter has found an apartment for them close to the hospital, and they will move there in a few days.

The first round of tests and examinations (blood tests, bone marrow punctation) has been concluded, but I won’t share any speculations on this until we’ve got them confirmed. The examinations will continue, and the best case scenario is that a transplant could happen 8 - 10 weeks from now.

Currently donations for Ivan are at about EUR …

This blog entry is about a specific storage engine in MySQL. The Federated storage engine enables data to be accessed from a remote MySQL database on a local server without using replication or cluster technology. When using a Federated table, queries on the local server are automatically executed on the remote (federated) tables. No data is stored on the local tables.

When we released MySQL 5.1.24, the Federated engine was not compiled in, pending decisions on our future steps. The reason for the removal was that we realised (albeit quite late in the game) that Federated has some bugs that expose the server to unnecessary risks. Fixing these bugs is a time consuming process, because the root cause lies in the design of the Federated engine.

The removal was a safety precaution, which made the server more secure. However, it also deprived some users of an engine that they had been using for some time (Federated was …

With 5.1 having officially been in Release Candidate status since September 2007 and soon approaching GA status, the MySQL Community Team launches a competition for the users of new features of MySQL 5.1:

Submit your MySQL 5.1 Use Case Report to community(at)mysql.com by 31 August 2008 and have a chance of winning one of our prizes:

• 1st-3rd prize: A MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius
• 4th-10th prize: MySQL …

During the last month, MySQL code has been migrated from BitKeeper to Bazaar. Bazaar is a distributed, free revision control system sponsored and supported by Canonical, the company behind the fast-growing Linux distribution Ubuntu.

We have migrated all MySQL code trees that were available in BitKeeper. This means not just current GA and development versions of MySQL Server and MySQL Cluster, but also the history all the way back to MySQL 3.23.22 released about eight years ago. And we’ve also migrated non-MySQL-server FOSS applications to Bazaar, such as MySQL Workbench (formerly not in BitKeeper but in Subversion, also known as svn) and our internal QA suites.

…

This blog posting has little to do with MySQL or Sun. It’s about experiences gathered while shuttling around the world as MySQL’s Ambassador to Sun, but it’s not about databases, it’s not about operating systems, nor computer languages: it’s about human languages, and how going beyond English provides a business advantage.

Let me try to grab your attention by first sharing my perhaps somewhat controversial conclusion:

English as a language of communication is much overrated. In an international setting, English may be sufficient for conveying meaning, but it has severe deficiencies when it comes to establishing a social relationship, to showing respect, to building trust, and to having fun.

For many years, I have attempted at learning how to say “thank you” and “please don’t smoke” and “where is …

Since meeting yesterday with Vladimir Voskresensky, a Sun colleague from St Petersburg, I have a new favourite answer to the request “so tell me an example of technical advantages resulting from Sun’s acquisition of MySQL“:

Using NetBeans as an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for coding and learning MySQL.

Now, that’s a simple answer, and that’s because it’s a simple and beautiful thought. But let’s start from the beginning.

In my days as a coder, I enjoyed the command line. I’ve used various coding editors, and I’ve disliked the hassle of learning new IDEs, who sometimes are more of a straightjacket than a productivity enabler. So call me conservative if you will, but …

This year, we got fourteen Google Summer of Code projects accepted. Colin Charles has informed the students, and things can now get started!

The first step is what’s called the Community Bonding Period. That’s happening right now, and also being facilitated by Colin. Colin has written a summary of the Community Bonding period on the Forge Wiki, and there’s also a general description by Google.

We expect great things from the students. We want them to produce code that our userbase can use as features in MySQL.

Given our high …

There’s a reason for Sheeri winning the Community Advocate of the Year award. Her activity level is hard to beat.

If you want a chance to beat Sheeri for 2009, you need to master multitasking. Not only is Sheeri listening to Mårten presenting his keynote. She’s preparing for some vlogging, i.e. recording Mårten’s presentation. And she’s blogging at the same time. And (although she doesn’t know it until three seconds after the picture was taken) she’s getting ready for getting up on stage to receive her 2008 award.

Ah, myself I’m only listening, and taking the odd picture. (Some of them very odd).

Every year, there’s a task that is both difficult and pleasant at the same time: Picking three outstanding contributors from the MySQL Community. Mårten Mickos, MySQL’s former-CEO and Sun’s now-SVP of the Database Group, has just presented the results by handing out the 2008 MySQL Community Awards.

Rich Green, Diego Medina, Baron “xaprb” Schwartz, Sheeri Kritzer Cabral, Mårten Mickos at the award ceremony

This time, our choice fell upon these three community members, whose contributions we very much appreciate:

Code Contributor of the Year: Baron “Xaprb” Schwartz, for the Maatkit toolkit
From the creation of the most popular MySQL toolkit, Maatkit, to his outstanding and comprehensive blogging, we would like to recognize Baron Schwartz for his extraordinary contributions to the greater MySQL …