More user group meetings in the coming days.
The meetup/mashup tour are events where the Sun and MySQL communities will meet, merge, discuss technology, socialize, and drink together.
On April 2nd the meetup is in a pub in Paris, where I expect that the drinking will overcome the technology, but I will let you know if things turn out different.
Milan will follow on April 3rd, in a more conservative venue (Sun conference hall), but the drinking doesn't have to be underestimated.
Hamburg on April 7th and Berlin on 8th will be definitely technical. The technical drink will start after the geeky stuff.

As you know, Sun's open source software and microprocessor strategy has been, at times controversial. We've filled trade journals and chat rooms with all kinds of dialog and the occasional crackpot conspiracy theory.

As many have rightly assumed from the outset, that controversy was, in fact, not a byproduct of the strategy - it was the strategy: if you're talking about Sun, you're not talking about the other guy. And then you'll buy a datacenter.

But now that we've firmly established our reputation for open source leadership, I'm very worried there's no more controversy to be had. There's too much trust in the system, and too much clarity around our strategic intent. So it's getting tougher and tougher to kick up a storm - and we can't very well spend a billion dollars or change our ticker symbol every time we want to generate a headline. Now can …

What does any developer do during a train trip? Correct, he’s hacking. He’s at least working on bells and whistles such as foreach() support for buffered ext/mysqli result sets in mysqlnd. Thanks Andrey!

$link = mysqli_connect('host', 'user', 'password');
$res = mysqli_query($link, 'SHOW TABLES FROM mysql');
foreach ($res as $row)
  var_dump($row);
mysqli_free_result($res);
mysqli_close($link);

Note: SVN/CVS only, mysqlnd only, buffered result sets only, no way to enforce any other fetch mode but MYSQLI_FETCH_ASSOC - but quite handy anyway.

What does any developer do during a train trip? Correct, he’s hacking. He’s at least working on bells and whistles such as foreach() support for buffered ext/mysqli result sets in mysqlnd. Thanks Andrey!

$link = mysqli_connect('host', 'user', 'password');
$res = mysqli_query($link, 'SHOW TABLES FROM mysql');
foreach ($res as $row)
  var_dump($row);
mysqli_free_result($res);
mysqli_close($link);

Note: SVN/CVS only, mysqlnd only, buffered result sets only, no way to enforce any other fetch mode but MYSQLI_FETCH_ASSOC - but quite handy anyway.

What does any developer do during a train trip? Correct, he’s hacking. He’s at least working on bells and whistles such as foreach() support for buffered ext/mysqli result sets in mysqlnd. Thanks Andrey!

$link = mysqli_connect('host', 'user', 'password');
$res = mysqli_query($link, 'SHOW TABLES FROM mysql');
foreach ($res as $row)
  var_dump($row);
mysqli_free_result($res);
mysqli_close($link);

Note: SVN/CVS only, mysqlnd only, buffered result sets only, no way to enforce any other fetch mode but MYSQLI_FETCH_ASSOC - but quite handy anyway.

While searching for something else, I just came across this blog entry which was apparently written late january: MySQL: the harpooned dolphin

It is, of course, fairly ill informed and full of errors. I won't even bother going through it all.
Actually, I can't for the life of me work out whether that site is satirical or for real. Looking through some of the more recent posts (election stuff), I'm wondering whether it might actually be real and is authored by some fanatical American republican zealot going nuts online. Or it's some smart person doing a real good impersonation of such a nut. Who knows...

Hmm, the site appears to be running Wordpress and PHP on Linux, and there's phpinfo() output somewhere with a modified PHP logo showing a seal. So, satire after all? Very well done in that case, but …

In the grand tradition of April Fool's stunts at Sun, the MySQL team decided to drape the Sun Menlo Park campus with inflatable pink and blue MySQL Dolphins! Marketing communications guru Steve Curry came up with the idea and we assembled a crackerjack team of local MySQLers to inflate 500+ dolphins late into the evening, with one dolphin for every member of Sun's Database Technology Group. Then we put on our all-black ninja wear (complete with Groucho disguise glasses) and we split up into teams to strategically place dolphins all around the Menlo Park campus well into the early hours... READ MORE

As a I wrote a couple of days ago, I went to the second day of PostgreSQL Conference East 2008 last Sunday. I had a good time and really enjoyed meeting everyone, listening, learning, and occasionally talking. I asked a number of fearless-newbie questions that paid off handsomely: people were very willing to humor me. I also left with a beautiful t-shirt, mug, and bag combo thanks to EnterpriseDB. The bag has already been put to use for a grocery shopping trip.

Note to conference/website organizers: I can’t link to anything but the front page, so I assume my link above will someday point to the 2009 conference, or the 2008 West conference. It would be good to give each event a permalink right from the start…

One thing that surprised me was the distance …

At 1:30pm EST today, I am giving my much-anticipated talk on Using Open Source Projects for Personal Profit at the first annual HabariCon, which is a celebration of uniting the user and developer communities in friendship and collaboration. I am expecting 80-120 people to show up for my talk, which focuses on how you can contribute a bit of code early on in an open source project's life and claim to be a valuable member of the committer society, thus increasing your overall karma in the open source community and landing you a higher-paying job. It's must-see learning for anyone interested in the economics of Cabal-coding. See you there!

Feel free to join the Habari Cabal and others on Freenode #habari and learn invaluable tips from some of the best open source community leaders in the world!

In my estimation, the GPL is by far the world's best open-source license for business. If Palamida's recent count of GPLv3-licensed projects is any indication, business in open source is very, very good:

Our database now contains over 2,000 projects that are using the GPL v3. At ...