Great news today (May 6, 2008). MySQL has confirmed that, contrary to previous leaked information, the online backup components will be open source. It means free, without exceptions, as announced. It couldn't be otherwise. On stage at JavaOne, both Jonathsn Schwartz and Rich Green stressed the importance of being open.
Politics aside, what is this online backup of which everyone has complained but few seem to have really tried?
In short, it's a feature that allows you to make a copy of the data from one or more database to a file.
The …

As reported yesterday from CommunityOne:

• MySQL Server is and will always remain fully functional and open source,
• so will the MySQL Connectors, and
• so will the main storage engines we ship.

In addition:

• MySQL 6.0’s pending backup functionality will be open source,
• the MyISAM driver for MySQL Backup will be open source, and
• the encryption and compression backup features will be open source,

where the last item is a change of direction from what we were considering before.

The change comes …

Close encounter of the sun Communities in San Francisco.

Josh Berkus and yours truly enjoyng the company friendly environment.

The main focus of version 0.2 was to improve handling of almost all of SQL. So now you can issue DESC TABLE tbl_name or RENAME TABLE tbl_name TO another_tbl_name on a partitioned table and you get correct results for SHOW TABLES etc.
Other statements are rejected and we settled down for the feature set we want to provide for full partition scans.
In addition to that there are some performance improvements.

See the full list of changes.

For the next release (0.3) we focus on the dictionary based partition lookup module and further performance improvements.

Finally, there is a new project home page: http://www.hscale.org.

In January, a developer chose to revoke the GNU GPL on his project. It generated quire a stir and even though growklaw seemed to be confident that such thing cannot happen, force is to note that the new GNU GPLv3 took care of adding the word irrevocable which was not in the GNU GPLv2.

In the same vein and commenting on dual-licensing is unfair and community debilitating, one of …

Just "released" the latest version of the Datagrid. Updates include:

• You can disable sorting for a given column or columns.
• Paging now has a "paging" CSS class (the next/prev links only). The bit that tells you how many rows there (x of y results) has the "paging_results" CSS class
• Order by links now preserve existing GET variables - thanks Tom
• Fixed hard coded perPage - thanks David
• Added NoSort() method which, unsurprisingly, disables sorting for a given column (or columns).

[Link]

Or, why the Inuits won't partner on selling Ice from Alfresco unless they change their strategy.

I usually agree with lot of the things Matt Asay writes but today in Closing an open-source deal trough your systems integrator , he thinks the way to work with partners in an opensource environment is to force them to sell the commercial solutions of your products.
He also thinks you should block them from starting an implementation before the end customer has signed a purchase order.

Whew.. this must be the most stupid idea he had since he started his opensource career. The sad part is that I haven't seen a commercially backer of an opensource project dealing correctly with …

A coworker found out how secure Amazon's MP3 store is.  Even big guys like Amazon make errors in their web site security.
So, I clicked purchase and the album immediately started downloading. It was at this point that I had the thought cross my mind: "Did I update my credit card info?"

Well, no, I didn't. Before the album finished downloading, I was trying to change the method of payment. Turns out, for a digital purchase, you can't do such a thing. So, I waited and wondered was was going to come of this...

UPDATE: There are some examples being added at the MySQL Forge now.

When I first started installing MySQL for myself, it was quite handy to have the example my.cnf files in the source package. I was a noob to the MySQL configuration. Even after I became more experienced, I would use them as a starting point. However, I now find that they are so behind the times they are not as useful. Here are some of the comments from the files.

my-small.cnf

# This is for a system with little memory (<= 64M) where MySQL is only used
# from time to time and it's important that the mysqld daemon
# doesn't use much resources.

my-medium.cnf

# This is for a system with little memory (32M - 64M) where MySQL plays
# an important part, or systems up to …

Just "released" the latest version of the Datagrid. Updates include:

• You can disable sorting for a given column or columns.
• Paging now has a "paging" CSS class (the next/prev links only). The bit that tells you how many rows there (x of y results) has the "paging_results" CSS class
• Order by links now preserve existing GET variables - thanks Tom
• Fixed hard coded perPage - thanks David
• Added NoSort() method which, unsurprisingly, disables sorting for a given column (or columns).

[Link]