As followers of Free / Open Source Software know, there are several ways of being free.

As for free as in speech, look for Wednesday’s keynote at the MySQL Users Conference here in Santa Clara on the US West Coast. It’s by Rick Falkvinge, party leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. Or download MySQL Community Server, it’s free as in speech.

As for free as in beer, sure, again, just download MySQL Community Server, install it, and use it. Old news.

But what if you’re lazy enough not to want to download and install MySQL Server? What if you just want to use an instance of MySQL Serer, installed and provided by someone else, with a simple command like

mysql -h db4free.net -P 3307 -u [username] -p[password] ?

Well, in that case, register for a …

I first decided to try how things were in Windows Vista land, the moment I was told during a talk of mine that MySQL refused to install on Vista. I gave it a twirl (after disabling User Account Control - UAC) and found that I got a rather quaint error message from the MySQL Server Instance Config Wizard (MySQLInstanceConfig.exe) [this after it failed to start once the installer was complete]:

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more details.

I hopped over to the event log (Event Viewer), and the error displayed was:

Activation context generation failed for “C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\bin\MySQLInstanceConfig.exe”.Error in manifest or policy file “C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\bin\MySQLInstanceConfig.exe” on line 6. The value “asAdministrator” of attribute “level” in element …

“We didn’t acquire MySQL to change it, but to learn from it”, or something to that effect, was a line used by Jonathan Schwartz very early on in the Sun acquisition of MySQL. And this seems to be taken seriously. So Sun has appointed teams studying MySQL: our culture, and our way of working from home (70 % of us don’t even have a desk at an office, i.e. permanently work from home, such as me).

I hope to soon share some of the results from the Culture studies. Today, co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius and I were the interview subjects of the “Virtual Work at MySQL” study group under Edel Keville.

We had lots of things to point out, but most things had already been said by the other interview subjects. The two key things that were missing were …

It was a clear sky in LA, but looking down, the city seemed to be covered in smog. After working on Sql Server 2008 material in LAX airport for a while, I boarded a turbo-prop for San Jose. Landing time was windy, so it was a bit bumpy. The only flight attendant, Cindy K, joked that “United throw in a few rides free of charge”. She was helpful with my luggage, with an easy smile.

So I checked in Radisson Hotel around San Jose airport afterwards. I booked the hotel through HotWire. It was a sweet deal, around 60 dollars per night. HotWire is a great site, especially for hotels. I’ve used it three times, all pretty satisfied.

Google map is awesome. It even provided me with information on how to get to Santa Clara convention center via public transportation. So I walked to the Gish station, saw Mexican, Moroccan, Japanese, and Chinese restaurants along the way, and got to the Santa Clara convention center in a jiffy. This is the …

You've got to respect any individual willing to kick off a presentation with a impression of Kermit the frog.  And not just an impression but a rendition of Kermit singing the rainbow connection.  Well Ben Klemens, tasked with leading the Free Software Foundation's End Software Patents campaign, is just such an individual (the point?  Kermit lied.  There aren't so many songs about rainbows).

I was able to grab Ben after his talk at the Free Software …

Today, we officially launched Kickfire. As part of our announcement we published, together with Sun Microsystems, record-breaking TPC-H benchmark numbers (data warehousing industry benchmarks) as well as a series of significant partnerships in the Open Source world.

There has been a lot of work here over the last two years to get us to this point and I am very proud of the team for getting us to where we are today. Two years ago we just had a vision; today that vision became reality – one substantiated by independent industry benchmarks.

For those of you unfamiliar with these benchmarks let me give you a brief overview to explain why we …

I got into San Jose last night around 4:00, picked up my rental car and headed over to the annual pre-conference party at Marten Mickos' house.  The food was amazing and it was great to finally meet the MySQL crowd in person.

It wasn't long however before I was invited by the MySQL Community Team to join them as they headed to the next event on the social calendar.   Armed with a garbage bag full of stuffed dolphins we headed over to Pedro's and the …

Just announced at the MySQL Partner meeting as part of the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, CA:

MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model — previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring (and thus code being tested) only in MySQL Enterprise.

As I’ve discussed before, the size of the user base for MySQL Enterprise is much smaller than for MySQL Community. That means these critical features will be tested by only a few of their customers. So, in effect, they will be giving their paying customers real, true, untested code. How is this supposed to work? In addition, this means that they …

"People get real testy with benchmarks"

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced new and enhanced third-party support for the MySQL™ database's unique pluggable storage engine architecture. The MySQL Certified Storage Engine Program (www.mysql.com/engines) enables commercial and community database engine developers to certify that their software has been tested and is compatible with Sun's MySQL Database Server ? helping to assure MySQL users that these certified engines have reached high-level standards of usability, performance and integration.