The latest from the MySQL community

I would like to welcome everyone to the new InfiniDB CE home at InfiniDB.org!

We have been working hard on creating this community to be both informative, easy to navigate and built with functionality to let all of the users have and give their feedback. If there is any sugestions you may have please stop by the forum and make a post in the "Suggestion Box".

To get to the forums, just go to the dropdown menu under "Community" and it is the first link you will see - "Forums".

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I would like to welcome everyone to the new InfiniDB CE home at InfiniDB.org!

We have been working hard on creating this community to be both informative, easy to navigate and built with functionality to let all of the users have and give their feedback. If there is any sugestions you may have please stop by the forum and make a post in the "Suggestion Box".

To get to the forums, just go to the dropdown menu under "Community" and it is the first link you will see - "Forums".

Read More...

In the MySQL Community team, our charter is to serve the MySQL community — new and old MySQL users alike. One of the ways we do this is by facilitating information exchange between community members, where the new can learn from the old.

And there’s been lots of that information exchange going on, such as over mailing lists (in the early days the dominant vehicle), forums, and Planet MySQL.

One problem with this information exchange has been its ephemeral nature. The same questions pop up for many new users, and should they for some reason not be amongst the issues solved in the MySQL documentation, chances are you’ll have to know quite precisely what you’re looking for when coming up with your Google search phrases. Of course, browsing Planet MySQL is a great way of keeping up to …

I think many people truly realized how much they take the MySQL documentation for granted during the recent multi-hour outage from mysql.com’s data center. Apparently there is a lot of FUD floating around about the legality of mirroring the documentation, as presented by Justin Swanhart and asked by Mark Callaghan.

The manual page at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/copyright-mysql.html says:

You shall not publish or distribute this documentation in any form or on any media, except if you distribute the documentation in a manner similar to how Sun disseminates it (that is, electronically for download on a Web site with the software) or on a CD-ROM or similar medium, …

As you may or may not know, long long ago (in this universe) I used to be the MySQL documentation team  Yes, a team of one. This was 2001. It was a great and interesting time. The current much extended team is doing a great job with the now much bigger set of docs!

Today, I find myself disagreeing with my former colleagues on one particular aspect, namely its licensing. You see, the documentation has never been released under an open license, it used to be plainly copyright all rights reserved, and later some rights were granted to distribute the docs together with the server.

Statements made earlier by Karen Padir regarding possible opening up of the docs license filled us with hope. Then, Stefan Hinz (the current docs team lead) wrote a blog entry MySQL documentation: no license change. Some of the arguments there we can …

By now many folks know that MySQL documentation is not changing its license. This is an issue with many sides, but before I go through them, I want to address a comment made by Masood Mortazavi:

People who are interested in forking the server — and potentially interested in creating what is in effect separate communities of their own — should probably develop their own docs for their own forks.

(There is a cost involved here, I know. However, it should be a cost worth paying if developers of forks really believe in their work. MySQL AB certainly paid that cost in developing the docs while it had already made the code itself freely available under GPL. So, the playing ground among all forks, etc., …

In a blog post today, Stefan of the MySQL documentation team says that the MySQL documents will not be open sourced. Now, I have to go back and review the MySQL CE Keynote that Karen gave, but I'm pretty sure she said to the audience that it was "going to happen". Why would she even bother bringing it up in the keynote if it was never really being considered anyway? There has been little community input on this, and I for one am outraged that a GPL product would not release the documentation as GPL too.

I'm now totally convinced that MySQL does not understand, and will never understand the MySQL community.

Is this an opportunity for Oracle to try to stall community participation in MySQL? I don't want to be paranoid, but this could just be the hints of bold new changes in MySQL strategy, especially considering Karen's …

I went looking for the MySQL 5.4 documentation today, but alas I could not find it. In particular, I went looking for the list of changes between 5.1.34 and 5.4.1.

If 5.4.1 is beta then it should definitely have documentation, at least in beta form. This is especially true in light of the Sun MySQL conference keynote kind of dangling a carrot on a stick, as it were, with a question to the audience about opening the docs up under the GPL. The comments system also needs updated too. I think that if public comments are available on the web site, then those comments should have a rating system attached so that crappy, wrong and useless manual comments can easily be filtered. But I digress.

So, Sun, when are going to release all the MySQL documents under the GPL? Is it going to be in the MySQL 5.4 time frame, or in some far off hazy future? And why are there no 5.4 documents available online, when the binaries are already …

MySQL is participating in Google Summer of Code 2009 (GSoC for short), and so is the MySQL documentation team. We've just put our ideas on this page; you might want to have a look if you're interested in applying for a GSoc project.

One of the projects is purely technical and doesn't involve writing any documentation, but rather improving the technique that goes on behind the scenery.

The other project does involve writing documentation, but it's mostly (if not exclusively) about creating examples for the Connectors & APIs chapter of the MySQL Reference Manual, so you don't have to be a Pulitzer award winner to contribute, but you should rather …

We're proud to announce that significant parts of the MySQL documentation are available on docs.sun.com now, including the MySQL 5.0 Manual, the MySQL 5.1 Manual, the MySQL 6.0 Manual, and the MySQL Enterprise Monitor documentation.

Big deal? Well, certainly for us, the MySQL Documentation Team. This marks a big step forward towards making MySQL visible as software offered by Sun Microsystems. The reason for publishing our documentation in two places (the MySQL Developer Zone and the Sun documentation home) is to make MySQL more visible and the docs easily accessible for Sun customers who are used to finding documentation in the "traditional" place on docs.sun.com.  At the same time, we were anxious not to break anything for MySQL …