This week at the EclipseCon in Santa Clara we announced that MySQL joined the Eclipse Foundation.  Admittedly, I wish we would have joined a long time ago (like maybe the first hundred times Mike and Donald asked us) but we finally got our ducks in a row.  To me Eclipse is one of the most successful and intriguing open source projects to date.  The entire process of open sourcing Eclipse was a masterpiece of strategy led by IBM that enabled them to create the best extensible tools platform.  There are really only two development tools platforms that matter: Eclipse and Visual Studio.  While both are open and extensible, only one of them is oopen source and cross-platform.

In fact, Eclipse has garnered support from more than 130 member firms and there are now more than 1000 Eclipse plug-ins and more than 60 projects …

At MySQL we've made a signficiant investment in expanding the community team.  This team is led by intrepid VP and multi-linguist Kaj Arno, and includes people on 3 continents who go out and spread the word of MySQL, help energize open source projects using MySQL, organize meetups, write occasional articles, and otherwise help make MySQL ubiquitous.  But there's always more that we could do.  Since we don't always know the answers, we thought we'd ask the community!

So here's an opportunity to influence things by letting the community team know your priorities.  There's a new quick poll on the MySQL developer zone asking quite simply: "What do you think the MySQL community team should focus on?"

• MySQL: Quick poll

Hacking the latest storage engine? Working on a fancy new SHOW command? Hunting for a bug in mysqld? This is for you!

Once you’ve got MySQL compiled, how do you test your mysqld binary? You’ll need to get it started. Stop! Don’t make install it!

1. Set up your sandbox

   $ mkdir ~/t
   $ vi ~/t/my.cnf
   

   Add the following to ~/t/my.cnf (modify to taste):

   [mysqld]
   basedir=sql
   datadir=/Users/jcole/t
   port=3307
   socket=/Users/jcole/t/mysql.sock
   skip-grant
   skip-innodb
   skip-bdb
           
   [client]
   port=3307
   socket=/Users/jcole/t/mysql.sock
   

2. Build your source
3. Set up a symlink for share

   $ ln -s . sql/share/mysql
   

   This, combined with the basedir=sql in my.cnf means that MySQL will be able to find its error message and character set files, so that the release you’re building doesn’t have to match the release installed on the …

The MySQL GUI team, under the leadership of graphical guru Mike Zinner, has posted a new beta version of MySQL Workbench.  This is a brand new graphical tool targeted to DBAs giving them a powerful graphical environment for modeling and managing database schemas.  This is an awesome tool that makes it easy to reverse engineer huge database schemas, maintain the model graphically, and it provides complete 2-way synchronization between the graphical model and the underlying database schema.  It provides automatic layout, customizable views, drag and drop capabilities and more. 

MySQL Workbench runs on …

Ok, I just had to laugh.  The Oracle FAQ site OraFAQ runs on... MySQL!   I guess it just goes to show how cost-effective open source is.  Here's some quotes from a thread on their discussion forum:

"Interesting - we don't run an Oracle database. But I suppose we ARE a free site so are probably a bit short of cash.

David "

...

"What cash? Every penny we make goes back into running and developing this site. There is no way we would be able to raise the money required to buy a commercial Oracle license.

Best regards.

Frank

To be honest, it's not a surprise.  There are tens of thousands of web sites that run MySQL ranging from the mega sites like Yahoo, Google, Craigslist, Travelocity, to many ecommerce sites, blogs, forums, and discussion sites.  After all, …

MySQL 5.0 has a ton of new features. In fact, several tons. Many people and companies were waiting endlessly for some of these features. Some of the new features include: Views, Stored Procedures and Stored Functions, Triggers, and some extra optimizations. Hoorah.

However, not all is peaches. In fact, there are few peaches to be found. Consider the rest of this post a bitch/complaint session and a call for a return to sanity. Let’s take a look at some of the major features of MySQL 5.0:

Views — Views are a …

In my long-running obsessive quest for the ultimate pocket PC, I was able to check out the OQO.  Peter Harvey, hot shot MySQL developer focused on ODBC, has one of these and he was gracious enough to give me some time on this thing.  (Frankly, he could have charged me $10 an hour.)  The OQO (pronounced just how it looks "oh-quo") was designed by some gurus out of Apple who developed the PowerBook laptops and have now focused their efforts on a super-portable Windows device that weighs less than a pound and fits in an inside jacket pocket. 

The latest version is the OQO+, which you can think of as OQO 1.1.  It's a minor update to the hardware with more memory …

Dave Winer is one of the pioneers of the software industry. He singlehandedly developed and popularized outliners as a software category and later helped develop XML-RPC, SOAP and RSS. 

There's a good interview on NerdTV where Robert X. Cringely interviews Winer and discusses topics such as outlining, the early days of the software industry, why programmers don't always get it, the development and evolution of OSS, publishing on the internet and more.  Dave's not known for being a shrinking violet; he has strong views on a lot of technologies.  But love him or hate him, he's had huge impact on software in the last ten years.

• NerdTV: …

I managed to get my hands on a fairly cool device, the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.  The picture above doesn't do it justice, but it's a small Internet tablet with built-in WiFi and a beautful crisp screen running 800x480 resolution. It weights just 8 ounces (230 grams) and can be easily carried in a jacket pocket.  Since the device is from Nokia, you might guess that it has basic phone capabilities or GPRS based web surfing, but it doesn't.  However, if you have a bluetooth enabled phone, you can surf via your phone. 

After a couple of days experimenting, I don't think this will replace my existing Palm Treo phone or Sony Vaio laptop, but I'm still impressed with it.  It offers the …

The annual EclipseCon conference takes place in Santa Clara in less than 2 weeks.  In just a few years, Eclipse has gone from a niche technology to absolute domination in tools.  Not only is Eclipse a hugely popular platform for C++ and Java IDEs, it has become the basis for tools across a wide range of languages and technologies. Whether it's web development, data tools, or SOA, there's an Eclipse-based tool.  At this point, the only holdout is Sun, who has their own NetBeans tool, but it's never had the same kind of traction as Eclipse and I think they are just bitter about that. 

Having spent a number of years at Borland in the 90s, where I helped launch Delphi and other products, I have always had a soft spot for Integrated …