At this year's CeBit 2009 trade fair, there was a dedicated exhibition area called the Open Source Forum. In addition to providing booths for various Open Source projects, they also had a stage for presentations about different topics. Every talk was recorded and available as a live stream during the show.

My dear colleague Simon Phipps spoke about "Adoption-Led: The Third Wave of Open Source" on Wednesday, I gave a presentation about "MySQL Backup and Security Best Practices" on Friday. The recording of these and all other talks as well as the Linux New Media Award ceremony are now available from the archives. Enjoy!

So we had a very nice dinner with Monty and the Finnish "MySQL Ab alumni". It was to my surprise augmented by Sergei Golubchick, whom I had never really met face to face and was delighted to be seated next to. Also a first for me was to meet Pekka Nousiainen, from the MySQL Cluster team. Which is funny because I kind of work together with him on IRC and email, but we had never met before "in real life" either.

Before the dinner I had asked in a rather cryptic message people to share some MySQL memories on a separate page on this site, followed up a couple days later by Kaj's less cryptic message. I printed whatever had arrived before I left for the restaurant and read a few snippets out loud. I should say that Monty liked it very much and thanked …

When planning which tools you use to maintain, build, and deploy your database, it is important to look at what tools are already available and in use within your organization. Using existing tools can save you a lot of time and helps standardize processes across your organization. If you manage both application development and database development - integrate your tools and processes from the onset to make your release cycles as smooth as possible.

Since my last post I've found out that using the 'morton' number to index spatial number is also referred to as the Z-order.

To index using this order, you can use this stored function:

CREATE FUNCTION getGeoMorton(lat DOUBLE, lng DOUBLE) RETURNS BIGINT UNSIGNED DETERMINISTIC 
BEGIN

  -- 11930464 is round(maximum value of a 32bit integer / 360 degrees) 
  
  DECLARE bit, morton, pos BIGINT UNSIGNED DEFAULT 0;  
 
  SET @lat = CAST((lat + 90) * 11930464 AS UNSIGNED);
…

I'm going to be talking in MySQL Conf 2009 about our business intelligence and data warehousing solutions for Habbo. Since this blog is syndicated on Planet MySQL, and I presume many of the people going to the conference read it, here's a question: would you like to hear about the why's of our technology selection (eg, IT management level questions), the techniques we use for analysis (for the BI analyst or startup technologist), or about the nuts and bolts of the database implementation itself (for the DBAs in the crowd)? I'm going to be touching on all three aspects, perhaps more, but can and will focus on one of the areas in more detail.

I am working on Wordcraft, trying to get the last annoying HTML validation errors worked out.  Thinks like ampersands in URLs.  In doing so, I am asking myself where the escaping should take place. In the case of Wordcraft, there are several parts to it.

1. The code that pulls data from the database.  Obviously not the right place.
2. The code that formats data like dates and such.  It also organizes data from several data sources into one nice tidy array.  Hmm, maybe
3. The parts of the code that set up the output data for the templates.
4. The templates themselves.

Now, I am sure 1 is not the place.  And I really would not want 4 to be the place.  That would make for some ugly templating.  Plus, the templates, IMO, should assume the data is ready to be output.  So, that …

I have synced the codebase with the 5.1.32 release of MySQL and it appears to work just fine. Sometimes frustrating that Bazaar takes a bizarre amount of time to do a merge.Download link for the source tarball are available from LaunchPad Download.As an experiment, I have built a Mac OS 10.5 installer package (x86 32bit) which I have also placed there. Took a bit of fiddling about to discover how

Although rails is a great development environment for web applications, for a newbie the deployment of a rails application can be challenging due to the myriad dependencies on various gems, native libraries etc.

image_science is one such ruby library that provides an easy way to generate thumbnails. It is therefore quite popular in web2.0 type applications (there isn't a site today that doesn't let you upload photographs of yourself, your pets, gadgets, whatever).  It is a very simple implementation and available as a ruby gem and so easy to install. However, the real work is done by a native library called FreeImage and installing this on OpenSolaris is a little bit of work. Although, I use OpenSolaris here, the instructions apply to Solaris 10 as well if you are using ruby from Web …

We are proud to announce the release of the first official Beta of MySQL Workbench 5.1, the next highly anticipated version of our database GUI tool - MySQL Workbench. For the first time we are making an announcement for all our major platforms at the same time: OSX, Linux and Windows.

MySQL Workbench 5.1 has some major improvement over our current 5.0 release, many of them might not be that visible when looking at the UI only. We did a major overhaul under the hood in addition to enhance usability and adding some features. On top of it, we moved some features to 5.1 OSS, that were only available in SE edition for 5.0 (like different notation styles i.e.). The editors have been tuned to startup more quickly, and some of them also got face lifted. All Wizards have been revamped using our new mForms library.

Please keep in mind that this is the first beta release of MySQL Workbench 5.1, and it’s not supposed to …