I just left a meeting with a large enterprise that dumped Microsoft Sharepoint for Alfresco for content management and collaboration. While that makes me smile, the thing that I loved hearing most from the vice president of IT was her general thoughts on open source, and why it's getting more play within this media company, including Alfresco, MySQL, Liferay, and more:

The culture here is about freedom and the ability to impact things ourselves. We're adopting more and more open source because we want to be in control of our own destiny....

In some cases, open source has meant higher implementation costs upfront but lower costs over the long run.

There is a resistance here to being framed into a long-term proprietary path: Closed APIs, closed standards, and closed source force us onto a vendor's licensing treadmill - we don't want that. We want flexibility and choice. We think about IT for the long run.

Music to …

Jonathan Schwartz of Sun, and Giuseppi Maxia of MySQL
Originally uploaded by FallenPegasusAccording to my Flickr stats, this picture just got a huge surge of views, most of them from "fakesteve.blogspot.com".

But when I go to that blog, I can't find the link.

Can anyone find it for me?

I'm pleased to announce the release of DBD::mysql 4.007. This release contains the changes:

* Took out mysql_server_init call where not needed
* Complete re-write of test suit to use Test::More - tons of cleanups!
* Makefile.PL changes to use current user in 'make test' if not defined

The biggest change in this release is a completely re-written test suite now using Test::More. This was something I wanted to do for at least two years. Using Test::More for the test suite makes it so much easier to add, manage and understand the various tests that come with the driver.

The file is:

file: $CPAN/authors/id/C/CA/CAPTTOFU/DBD-mysql-4.007.tar.gz
size: 123516 bytes
md5: 67a4d921acda942aeb0e65a0023f2098

URL:
http://search.cpan.org/~capttofu/DBD-mysql-4.007

…

Properties:

Description:

This variable if enabled, makes InnoDB to create a separate .ibd file for storing indexes and data. Setting this variable makes it easy to manage disks with huge tables. Having …

I have always considered MySQL as the best model for open source companies. Their approach to the market, the execution of different business models, their relation with the community or the way their work internally as a virtual organization have shown an innovative and successful example of how an IT company in the 21st century can be managed.

The agreement with Sun, announced last January, was the crowning point of all the efforts put in the company since the beginning, proving the success of their innovative model. Since then I have been trying to put some order in my ideas about their model and summarize them in a few blocks that could serve as a quick guide to emulate their success. I discussed my ideas with Henrik Ingo, a friend of mine …

So, remember last month when there was all that furor over the apparent move by MySQL to start making some bits and pieces of the hugely popular open source database over into close source? (Here, Clarifying the MySQL "Closed-Sourcing" brouhaha, for example.)

Well, er, it turns out that the correct answer is: "Never mind."

Per Kaj Arno, MySQL VP Community, MySQL Server is Open Source, even Backup extensions.

You can get the Slashdot crowd's viewpoint here, MySQL Reverses Decision On Closed Source.

Much as I like to rationalize and "support" open source vendor policies, no matter how ill-conceived, …

Recently I ran into major problems using GNU diff. It would crash with "diff: memory exhausted" after only a few minutes trying to process the differences between a couple 4.5GB files. Even a beefy box with 9GB of RAM would run out of it in minutes.

There is a different solution, however, that is not dependent on file sizes. Enter rdiff – rsync's backbone. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync (search for rdiff).

The upsides of rdiff are:

• with the same 4.5GB files, rdiff only ate about 66MB of RAM and scaled very well. It never crashed to date.
• it is also MUCH faster than diff.
• rdiff itself combines both diff and patch capabilities, so you can create deltas and apply them using the same program

The downsides of rdiff are:

…

One of my hobbies that has taken a good bit of time lately has been to revamp my photo album. I originally wrote it a few years ago and, while it has served its purpose well, it lacks some features that I would like to see and represents less than ideal design decisions. This time around I have started from the ground up and, as a result, have the opportunity to apply some of the things I have learned n the past two years. For instance, this time around, all my main tables will be using InnoDB (or another transactional engine depending on when I finish the dern thing :) completely with foreign keys and, of course, making use of transactions where possible.

Recently while working on my little project, I discovered the value of TRADITIONAL. I am referring, of course, to to the SQL mode setting in MySQL that makes it behave more like, well, a "traditional" database. I tend to think of that as both somewhat unfair and vague. It might be …

I honestly do not know why somebody would want to export each record from a table in to its’ own files in a csv format. I am sure people have their own reasons. But since I got request from couple people, I figure I would post a solution here. Same script can be used to dump the whole table in to one csv file as well, with little tweaking. I will start with creating database with a table. I then insert three rows with test data into the table just to show three separate files creation.

mysql> CREATE DATABASE testdump;
mysql> USE testdump
mysql> CREATE TABLE `testtable` (
`id` TINYINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ,
`testfield` VARCHAR( 15 ) NOT NULL ,
`testfield2` VARCHAR( 15 ) NOT NULL
) ENGINE = innodb COMMENT = 'test table for dumping each row to file';
mysql> INSERT INTO `testtable` values ('','test1','test2'),('','test3','test4'),('','test5','test6'); …

One of my hobbies that has taken a good bit of time lately has been to revamp my photo album. I originally wrote it a few years ago and, while it has served its purpose well, it lacks some features that I would like to see and represents less than ideal design decisions. This time around I have started from the ground up and, as a result, have the opportunity to apply some of the things I have learned n the past two years. For instance, this time around, all my main tables will be using InnoDB (or another transactional engine depending on when I finish the dern thing :) completely with foreign keys and, of course, making use of transactions where possible.

Recently while working on my little project, I discovered the value of TRADITIONAL. I am referring, of course, to to the SQL mode setting in MySQL that makes it behave more like, well, a "traditional" database. I tend to think of that as both somewhat unfair and vague. It might be …