I am now at FOSDEM, volunteering at the MySQL project stand and attending sessions in between. Today is the most important day for MySQL. At 13:15 CET there will be a talk by Kaj Arno covering recent events at Sun/MySQL. I am here with Santo Leto from HoneySoftware at the moment and he is going to attempt [...]

Here is nice gotcha which I've seen many times and which can cause just a minefield for many reasons.
Lets say you had a system storing articles and you use article_id as unsigned int. As the time goes and you see you may get over 4 billions of articles you change the type for article_id to bigint unsigned but forget linked tables.

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> CREATE TABLE article_comment(article_id int UNSIGNED NOT NULL, comment_id int UNSIGNED NOT NULL, KEY(article_id));
2. Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.11 sec)
3.  
4. mysql> INSERT INTO article_comment VALUES(4300000000,1);
5. Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)
6.  
7. mysql> INSERT INTO article_comment VALUES(4300000001,1); …

Peter Gulutzan and Mark Leith have both written about the new PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA in MySQL. I’ve read through the worklog, or most of it – there were some spots where Firefox seemed to start overlaying parts with other parts, quite weird. But anyway I’ve read as much as I can. Obviously many people have been putting a ton of thought into this for years, and I can’t pretend to judge their work in a single sitting.

Just slightly over a year ago I posted Welcome Aboard, MySQL! from Orlando. Since then we have worked together in many things including GF Bundles, IdMgr, Telco, OSS Price/Performance, Pricing, even Legal. Possibly the biggest impact of the acquisision has been on the …

My last post was for all users, technical and non. This post is for the techies who know me, and are switching. Some are coming from Windows, some from Linux, some are designers who need to do some local development. So, I’ll try to keep this post as simple as possible, and perhaps more like a tutorial, where you can “copy and paste” commands and files.
If you’re going to be doing any kind of web development, chances are you’ll be deploying to a linux/unix server. I don’t know anything about Windows or IIS, so ignore this post if you’re looking for IIS help. I’m also assuming basic level of knowledge with how to find and edit files either via Finder, or via Terminal. For the non unix folks ~ for the rest of the article, means “Your home directory” . Your home directory is usually …

Given the changes announced this week, I have updated my original plans for my presentation on Sunday. I was going to talk about Social networking, but am now changing it to a very interactive Q&A session.

I expect people are asking themselves

• What has changed?
• What will happen now?
• What are the consequences for the MySQL roadmap?
• Are there other consequences for the MySQL community?

and I will attempt at answering these questions interactively during FOSDEM.

Towards the end of next week, after internal coordination, I plan to share some further thinking on the “what will happen now” front with my blog readers.

What also I plan to do during …

Few days ago we were chatting in our corporate Campfire room and one of the guys asked me what do I think about Rails developers hiring process, what questions I’d ask a candidate, etc… This question started really long and interesting discussion and I’d like to share my thoughts on this question in this post.

So, first of all I would like to explain what kind of interviews I really hate Ever since I was thinking of myself as of a developer (many years ago) and was going to “software developer position” interviews I really hated questions like “What is the name and possible values of the third parameter of the function some_freakin_weird_func() from some_weird.h” or “How to declare a virtual destructor and when it could be useful?”… All my life I had pretty practical thinking and never bothered to learn APIs or some really deep language concepts that are useful in 1% of …

Yet Another Switch Page 2.0

It’s been 4 years since I switched to the Mac. A few years ago I made a page for other switchers. I’m making a new list, as a lot of my friends have finally switched themselves, or are thinking about it. Please share and add your favorite apps in the comments.

The List
Here is the software I use, in order of importance to myself.

1. QuickSilver: If you don’t like using the mouse, this is your friend. It’s not just an app launcher, with the power of chaining, I can create tasks in RTM , straight to iCal, Calculator, and send quick emails with text snippets
2. Terminal.App: This comes with OS X, and is still my prefered method of …

Last week, I wrote about an experimental video program that I am coordinating for Mozilla.

I’ve now posted a more complete overview of the program, along with a draft guide for the program testers and an early FAQ on the program.

Helping us in our early stages are the following good and brave souls:

• Alina Mierlus, Free Software/Open Source advocate and a driver of Mozilla.ro
• …

These are my spoken notes from last week's earnings call - rather than recraft them, I figured I'd simply republish.

_______________________________

And thank you all for joining us this afternoon. 

I'll start with some perspective on our Q2 results and the current climate, then follow-up with commentary on our products disclosure - slides 6 and 7 in the slide deck. Then I'll turn it over to Mike Lehman (Sun's CFO) for commentary on financial metrics, and an update on the restructuring plan we announced back in November.

Overall, results for Q2 were in line with what we expected, as macro worries factored into customer discussions across all geographies. These concerns resulted in decisions related to higher end system purchases being pushed out - so billings were down year over year for SPARC Enterprise …