I’m still kicking around the ideas suggested by Tim Bowden’s post, which suggested that the GPL is a better licensing choice than BSD for vendors establishing commercial dominance around an open source project.

If you were to draw up a list of the most successful commercial open source vendors, I believe they would all be based on either the L/GPL or the MPL. Certainly, taking Tim’s central point about M&A valuations for open source vendors as the yard stick, then the largest open source M&As have all involved copyleft licenses (although Ian Skerrett …

Doing performance analyzes today I wanted to count how many hits come to the pages which get more than couple of visits per day. We had SQL logs in the database so It was pretty simple query:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. SELECT sum(cnt) FROM (SELECT count(*) cnt FROM performance_log_080306 GROUP BY page HAVING cnt>2) pv;

Unfortunately this query ran for over half an hour badly overloaded server and I had to kill it in the end.

The reason for slowness was of course huge temporary table was required (there were about 5 million of distinct pages visited during that day) which resulted in on disk temporary table which as we know quite slow.

Of course it would be possible to allocate more memory to the temporary table or switch to filesort method and get result faster.

I however picked another road which is quite helpful in similar cases - I did not need exact result but …

Are you close to Munich? Are you available next Friday afternoon? Would you like to meet some MySQLers? And some Sun employees, whom we hope to lure from Sun’s German headquarters in Heimstetten?

Then, come to the Hilton where many of the Bundesliga football clubs stay when playing against FC Bayern München: Munich Hilton am Tucherpark, close to Englischer Garten.

I suggest you to be there at about 14:30. We theoretically start at 14, but two Sun execs and I are arriving late from Hamburg that same afternoon. We expect to be there by 14:45.

What will we discuss?

Well, the setup is the same as for many other meetups, between MySQLers, customers, community, and Sun employees. We’ll tell you that we’re continuing our support of all popular operating systems, and all popular development environments — just like we’ve stressed elsewhere. We’ll share our thinking on what will change and what will stay the …

In my previous post I briefly mentioned Database Appliance with Project Indiana. Now that Sun has acquired MySQL (or as some people say MySQL has acquired Sun) and with our existing work in progress with PostgreSQL, there are quite a bit of options available of using some combination  of Storage, System, Operating System, Database  along with some end user application and present it as either Database Appliance or use it as Embedded Database. 

I thought I will just discuss the audience, symptoms, merits, cons etc regarding the two approach and how they can be useful. 

 The first question is who likes database appliances and who wants embedded database? To answer that I would put the question back: What do you in hand? A hammer or a screw-driver? Because if you have a hammer, the whole world is a nail to you and …

Project 365, Day 64: The Sun Offer
Originally uploaded by FallenPegasus This is the stack of paperwork I had to swallow and sign if I wanted to follow MySQL into Sun Microsystems.

OpenOffice.org has announced that the project will be moving from its current LGPLv2 licensing to the LGPLv3 with a coming version 3.0 of the open source office software suite. Sun’s Simon Phipps says the move will give OpenOffice developers greater protection from software patent enforcement and threats because the LGPLv3 allows creation of mutual patent grants between developers. Also among the biggest changes is a move from the Joint Copyright Assignment (JCA) to the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA), effective immediately. OpenOffice.org Community Manager Louis Suarez-Potts says this change, plus an addendum specifically for OO.o core and plugin developers, enabling OO.o to more easily host the source code of extensions (without shared copyright), promoting potential …

A lot of people contact me asking if I’m looking for a job. (I have an unanswered email in my inbox right now.) People are looking desperately for qualified, knowledgeable MySQL professionals. There’s a critical shortage of people who can admin MySQL moderately well, much less at the guru level.

If you are one of the many who are trying to hire a MySQL DBA, you should send your employees to the MySQL Conference and Expo. Not just this year — every year. Train a smart person instead of trying to hire someone who’s ready to go now.

This is the unfortunate reality: MySQL’s popularity has caused demand to far exceed supply. That’s what happens when a great disruptive innovation takes hold.

What do you do in the meantime?

If you just need a little help, hire a part-time DBA and get some consulting help. Without endorsing them directly, may I suggest …

Andrew Aksenoff is pretty slow with release numbers for Sphinx. By MySQL Users Conference 2007 Sphinx version 0.9.7 was released and today we had just 0.9.8-rc1 announced This minor change in version number corresponds to about double source size (looking at download size) and major rewrite for many portions. Sphinx 0.9.8 snapshots were more stable than 0.9.7 for a long time but I guess Andrew did not call them releases because documentation was incomplete and this just was fixed now.

Hopefully Andrew gets 0.9.8 release out for MySQL Users Conference.

BTW Andrew will be speaking at MySQL Users Conference so if you wanted to learn more about Sphinx it is great place to come.
Also he will stay in Bay Area for a few more days so if you're implementing Sphinx and would like some first hand help or advice this would be great opportunity.

Entry posted by peter | …

It looks like my tutorial is almost sold out (and so are several of the others already!)

So if you're planning to go to the MySQL conference, don't delay - go sign up!

Unimpressed by the ongoing PDO 2 debate, we have continued working on PDO/mysqlnd for MySQL. It turned out that the current status of PDO makes developing and testing a new driver a challenge. I spent quite a lot of time comparing the different behaviours of the various drivers in the hope I could find out how PDO drivers are supposed to work. The PDO documentation and the specification do not cover each and every detail. PDO really needs some love…

Why do people suggest to improve PDO before kicking-off a PDO 2 project?

The challenge of the day was to find out what PDO::FETCH_UNIQUE is about. All what the first page of the PDO manual tells you is, that is is a predefined (class) constant of the type INT. But luckily, there is more to learn about it on the manual page of …