I love this company!
MySQL is still a virtual company. The Sun acquisition hasn't change this very peculiar fact. Yesterday and the day before we have held IRC meetings between the MySQL community and some Sun open source big shots.

On Monday evening in Boston, there will be a more traditional user group meeting in Boston, host by Sheeri K. Cabral. Actually, not very much traditional. I mean, the real people will physically attend the meetup, but the whole meetup will be recorded, and you can participate via IRC. And, even better, I will make a guest appearance via video-conference.
So, please meet me in Boston …

On Monday, March 10th, Sun makes a stop in Boston on its world tour of “Mashup Meetups”. If you can’t make it in person, join us on the live ustream videocast at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/oursql-the-mysql-database-videocast Currently there’s a promo for your viewing pleasure at (see “Video Clips”). I am very excited about this new videocast for the [...]

Yes, it has been a while since I added an entry in my blog. I have been working on creating a dynamic data warehouse system reliant on the traditional LAMP stack (and a very nifty graphical plug-in - please comment below if you wish to know what it is!).Firstly, I must make these qualifications before you read further:I consider Bill Inmon and Ralph Kimball the pioneers of data warehousing; Data

Welcome the the 87th of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. First up, a couple of items responding to news about H-Store, the new database technology. Nigel Thomas of Preferisco wonders if H-Store is a new architectural era, or just a toy? Too much information, in turn, asks, Is H-Store the future of database [...]

This is a public service announcement, and while databases should not have a problem as this Sunday we “spring ahead”, some people might be confused as to why systems were “dead” for an hour, and show no activity/sales/whatever.

This Sunday, March 9th, most locales in Canada and the US start to “save daylight” by “springing ahead” one hour. At 2 am local time (that would be “really late Saturday night” for the party-goers), the time jumps ahead one hour.

Databases such as MySQL should continue to work just fine, but your monitoring graphs will show a dead zone, your sales charts will log no sales, and similar phenomena will occur. Nothing to worry about, but since I haven’t seen the post made yet, I figured I would remind folks.

Have you ever heard the one about throwing hardware at a software problem? In one of my previous blog posts, I mentioned something along the lines of?well I’ll just cut and paste . . . In my experience, the solution to most problems (the ones the caller refers to as “it’s running slow”) are not rooted in [...]

Generally, when a company wants to open a new market it needs to spend months to years dumping money into it to stoke demand.

MySQL and other open-source companies do market development a little differently. They dump software to seed a market. Lots of software.

Sun executive and former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos discusses this in a recent article with Computer Business Review:

I would say the ratio [between raw downloads and installations] is between one in one hundred and one in one thousand. If you look at averages you get useless information, because we might get 10 million downloads in China and we know almost none of them will pay anything in the near future. In the web 2.0 space, most will pay. In countries with a high GDP, many will pay, and in those with a low economy absolutely nobody will pay today. …

Good database administrators have to plan for the worst. You make a script to backup your data, make sure the script runs properly under cron, store copies of the backups off site, test to make sure you can restore from an old backup, and you still are almost comfortable with the safety of your data. Something in recesses of your mind whispers an almost audible message that you forgot to check one thing. 'What could it be?' you ask yourself in the sleepless hours spent looking for your Achilles Heel.

A friend sent me an email this morning to tell me he wanted to pull back an old copy of a large database that he had backed up months before. The backup was in a file named DEPT072-may-06.sql. So he did the following:

Linux> mysqladmin create scratchdb
Linux> mysql scratchdb > DEPT072-may-06.sql

And then he walked away to get a fresh cup of coffee. When he returned, he was …

Some days a go I discovered a wonderful thing called computer columns when I stumbling on MS SQL server. There is a free MS SQL server 2005 express that you can download off a Microsoft site. Yes, I know, FREE and from microsoft.

(P.S. for those who didn’t read, Bill Gates is now the 3rd richest man in the world after 13 years of being number one.)

I also read a really good article that explains indexes on computed columns. The benefits of speeding up searches with them and adding business rules. Obviously, the business rules were particularly interesting to me.

Jay Pipes had a similar webinar …

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 …