I had an interesting discussion with Marten Mickos at JavaOne last week that I've been meaning to blog about. I was disappointed that MySQL decided to put encryption and compression backup into MySQL Server (GPL license), versus including those features only in MySQL Enterprise (commercial license). Most of you will recall the outrage from "the community" that began when MySQL considered adding these enterprisey features only inside of MySQL Enterprise. I wanted to discuss this situation with Marten. I do not believe that Support and/or Monitoring around an OSS product are viable long term value propositions that will convince users... READ MORE

As you probably know, or at least heard, we are currently porting Workbench to Linux. Generally speaking the porting process is split in several stages. The first one is to compile non-GUI Back-End which represents about 80% of the total application code. The next stage is to ensure that unit-tests are run correctly for the ported stuff. The third is to create user interface and to bind it to the back-end/core. After that we will have alpha version of Workbench for Linux.
Regarding tests, actually a portion of unit-tests are already passed. These are 121 of 122 going well. At the moment we are working on non-GUI back-end, and core part is compiled and run, so now the modules and plugins are in progress. I must admit that process of porting is pretty smooth, most of the code has already been prepared with Linux/OS X ports in mind. I will be posting our progress on the porting efforts frequently, please keep checking our blog.

Very nice comparision of SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL servers.MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

Very nice comparision of SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL servers.MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

As promised, after individual presentations at last week's CommunityOne I brought together the community leaders of three of the top GNU/Linux distros (Zonker Brockmeier, OpenSUSE; Jono Bacon, Ubuntu; Karsten Wade, Fedora), threw in Glynn Foster of OpenSolaris and moderated a no-holds-barred panel.  (It took them three hours to clean up the blood afterwards!!)

Although the panel itself wasn't recorded, immediately after it concluded, the five of us headed to the make-shift podcast studio we had set up at the event …

MySQL has a handy feature, that allows you to turn an INSERT into an UPDATE if a unique or primary key duplication is detected:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/insert-on-duplicate.html

A common usage pattern for this is “lazy initialization“ of a row in a database, which is exactly what my team was using it for yesterday to solve a problem in the backend for version 2.0 of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor. However, we ran into an issue where Hibernate would throw an exception complaining that when the INSERT was turned into an UPDATE, it couldn‘t retrieve the generated primary key value (we are using auto increments on this particular table, as it‘s not a high insertion-rate table).

To understand why this happens, you have to know a little bit about how Statement.getGeneratedKeys() works with MySQL‘s JDBC driver. …

In the Columbus, Ohio, airport right now waiting to board my plane to Salt Lake City. Tonight, I will be speaking on Join-Fu at the PLUG (Provo Linux User Group). Ryan Simpkins asked that I speak "at a very advanced level" and so that's what I will be doing! We'll see how the PLUG members handle my new set of slides on Intermediate Join-Fu that I have been working on...

I will post the slides a little later today after the PLUG meeting. I'm really looking forward to meeting Ryan and the other folks from PLUG and getting a short tour of Omniture, a large web analytics company that uses MySQL (no, it's not Overture. Totally different. One of those is now extinct.)

“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”
— Howard Aiken

MySQL is back on Open Source track and that is definitely the best news for all (including community, MySQL and Sun as well). I think that now Sun/MySQL have agreed to the importance of community, it becomes community's responsibility to give them more reasons to believe so. Let's participate like never before.

Kaj, in his post says "...model to be useful for both those who spend money to save time, and those who spend time to save money". This is what Open Source is, isn't it?

All in all, a decision most awaited and …

This is just a very short note about the recent license change from LGPL to GPL made by the author of extJS. When choosing an open source product make sure that the contributors are fragmented across enough organizations to prevent any chance of being able to do a license change. If that is not the case make sure that the community is large enough so that you have a good chance at succeeding with a fork if the need arises. In the case of extJS the later seems to be the case. As such the license change itself is not soooo big an issue, since a lot of people do not consider their frontend code to be proprietary anyways. The source is there for all to see. So for the most part people are fine considering their frontend to be licensed under the GPL. That being said, extJS guys are …

I spotted an interesting blog post over on Planet OSDB about prepared statements gotchas. It illustrates very well the issue that prepared statements have been plagued with since their inception: namely that they can severely hurt performance (even though they are considered to improve performance by most people).

Just briefly: Why do we even care for prepared statements? For stateless web applications the benefits are mainly protection against SQL injection and better readability. In some rare cases in theory also better performance if the same statement is executed multiple times in the same request. The disadvantage is that for most web applications queries are rarely executed more than once and therefore the separation of parsing/planning and execution just means that there is an …