FrOSCon is a two-day conference on free software and open source, which takes place on August, 23th and 24th 2008 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

Focus of the conference is a comprehensive range of talks about current topics in Free Software and Open Source. Furthermore, space will be provided for developers of free software and open source projects to organize their own developer meetings or even their …

Past Tuesday we had our 5th Belgian MySQL meetup with around 12 attendees, and it was great! I hoped for a large audience, but the spirits were good and we had some fun and good chats. I started out giving a brief history of MySQL and ending with Sun buying us. Important was to get the message out which Kaj explained us last week in Munich (Germany).

The main topic was Performance Tuning best practices, but I didn't go intensively deep on it. This is something we should do again in a large group and just that presentation.
After that, we talked about communities and more importantly growing a PHP UserGroup in Belgium. Michelangelo and Felix are really doing great and it's probably going to be a hit. I, and probably the whole MySQL Community team, would definitely like to help out to get it started.

I had some people commenting about doing these meetups during the day, during working hours. Yes, this would be nice, …

It should be available in the 5.0 source tree w/in the next few days.

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=35178

I have been quite vocal at every opportunity about how surrogate keys suck. However I must admit, as vocal as I may be, I have not really been good at working towards not using them myself. So briefly what are surrogate keys? They are usually those meaningless integer identifiers you see everywhere. Yes like in the url to this very blog post. People have come to love them however, especially people that use tools to generate SQL for them. But general wisdom tells people that everything is faster with integers. I keep hearing the same story over and over from self proclaimed MySQL, PostgreSQL or whatever kind of RDBMS they are flying experts. Index reads, joins and of course development since most tools are optimized (or should we rather say oversimplified things) towards integer surrogate keys. Now I …

SFLC settles GPL lawsuit with Verizon. Novell anounces plans for SUSE 11. Sun launches open source initiative for SMB market. (and more)

BusyBox Developers Agree To End GPL Lawsuit Against Verizon, Software Freedom Law Center (Press Release)

Novell Announces Development Plans for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, Novell (Press Release)

Sun Microsystems Launches SMB Initiative; Delivers Complete Open Source Solutions to New Customers, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Open Source Software Gurus Converge in …

Just a quick note to say we have reached the production stage of the book project. Production is the process of transforming our OpenOffice.org files into the final page layout using a professional typesetting program.

As you can probably guess, this is later than we would have wished. This also means we won’t have the book for sale at the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo. We will have a display copy at the O’Reilly booth at the conference, and you will be able to pre-order the book at a discount at that booth. (Several details remain to be worked out — do not trust the Amazon.com information on the book, as it is a weird blend of the first and second editions).

The book is very, very good. You will not be disappointed. I can’t think of a credible way to explain how good this book is — it’s just very, very good. Better than anything else you’ve …

I was asked this question recently, and I thought it was a great little tidbit of knowledge to pass along. The short answer is “no”. The slightly longer answer was written up by Jan Kneschke when dealing with a forum post about proxy + connection pooling.

From http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?146,169265,169700

The clear-text password is _never_ transfered in the authentication phase.

On the network we have:
* client connects to server (no data)
* server sends a seed (40 char, one-time, random)
* client sends 40 char hash of (seed + PASSWORD(clear-text-password))
* server compares against the hash(seed + SELECT password FROM mysql.user WHERE username = )

That way we never have the password as clear-text on the wire. (only in SET PASSWORD or GRANT statements).

At this year’s MySQL Conference & Expo, taking place in Santa Clara, California in mid-April, I’m giving two sessions:

• Best Practices for Database Administrators
• Database Security Using White-Hat Google Hacking

You can see more info about me here, including descriptions of the workshops.

I look forward to seeing many of you there. Make sure you say hello!

Finally! The ability to look a little closer into what's happening with SHOW PROFILEHere’s how it works:mysql> set profiling=1;mysql> select count(*) from mysql.user;+----------+| count(*) |+----------+| 5 |+----------+1 row in set (0.00 sec)mysql> show profile;+--------------------------------+----------+| Status | Duration |+--------------------------------+-----

Dear Readers,

I have a favour to ask. Please register for the first hands-on workshop about programming CouchDB.

Here is the story:

With my slight NADD infection I have, of course, set up a Google Alert on CouchDB. A few weeks ago, an alert came in that surprised me. Fortunately in a good way. The call for papers of the 2008 edition of XTech, a (duh) tech conference in Dublin, Ireland, asked specifically for CouchDB related submission.

How cool is that?

I sent in a whole bunch of proposals, just to make sure one gets through and it …