No, this is not a blog post on the endless battle between end user and developers as a result of them not understanding each other. No, this post is about "what determines the value of a software/service company". Is it the number of end users or the developers/service people?

Lets start off with a made up example: What would MySQL AB be worth if, lets say Microsoft and not Sun would have bought it? Microsoft would have gotten a ton of users this way. Maybe it would have been worth the price just for an opportunity to try and kill a competitor (this would of course only partially work due to MySQL's GPL nature). How many developers would quit their jobs? How would that affect the future of the product? Ultimately I would expect the chances for a MySQL product and related services to go down considerably because key developers leaving would diminish end user trust and they would spearhead the creation of alternatives.

Now what …

I’ve been coding a couple of scripts that run on 5 minute intervals to grab RSS/Atom feed data from http://mysql-dba.com and import that into a MySQL database. It idea is to create a search function for the site that will look at all past data from the aggregated feeds. Since there are multiple pollers running at different intervals I decided to use Innodb for the read/write nature of the poller/processing scripts.

This is very simple so far - and as such I felt it should be documented from the start unlike many of my other projects. Here’s the feed table that is storing the information from the RSS feeds.


mysql> show create table feed_items\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Table: feed_items
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `feed_items` (
`id` bigint(20) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`rss_site_id` int(11) …

IBM plans a residency to write a Redbook about the IBM DB2 for i5/OS as a Database Engine for MySQL:

Seize this opportunity to be among the first, elite IBM System i professionals worldwide to gain hands-on and practical experience with the MySQL on i5/OS. Working alongside and exchanging knowledge with some of the top database experts in the System i, you will develop a competitive edge that will serve you well in successful service delivery to System i clients. MySQL is used extensively with opensource PHP applications. As our customers deploy PHP web applications, many of them are looking to run MySQL as well.

The …

Yesterday’s Pop Quiz seemed quite popular, I got some personal responses and a couple of funny comments.

So here’s another one:

The table t is defined thusly on a MySQL server with no sql modes set:

  CREATE TABLE t (
   id INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT
  );

You now do…

  INSERT INTO t (id) VALUES (NULL);
  SELECT * FROM t WHERE id IS NULL

What will be the result of the SELECT?

Spanish translation by Marcos Besteiro
(more…)

I've been doing a lot of work lately on behalf of clients who are looking to deploy applications to virtual data centers. When I first started working as a technology consultant in the '90s, it was a given that if you wanted to have a web application, you had to buy a bunch of servers and rent out a cabinet in a data center somewhere. Now the notion of spending all that money on hardware that will go obsolete in a few years seems like insanity most of the time (particularly when the size of the audience for your application is completely unknown). When I first started a hosted web service in 1999 people judged us by how many servers my company owned. Now when I tell them "we don't own any servers at all" they nod knowingly.

It's great that we have more cost-efficient virtualization options today than we had ten years ago. Unfortunately, though, virtualization is a disruptive technology, which means that there are incumbents (including …

I've been doing a lot of work lately on behalf of clients who are looking to deploy applications to virtual data centers. When I first started working as a technology consultant in the '90s, it was a given that if you wanted to have a web application, you had to buy a bunch of servers and rent out a cabinet in a data center somewhere. Now the notion of spending all that money on hardware that will go obsolete in a few years seems like insanity most of the time (particularly when the size of the audience for your application is completely unknown). When I first started a hosted web service in 1999 people judged us by how many servers my company owned. Now when I tell them "we don't own any servers at all" they nod knowingly.

It's great that we have more cost-efficient virtualization options today than we had ten years ago. Unfortunately, though, virtualization is a disruptive technology, which means that there are incumbents (including …

Congrats to Drupal for releasing version 6.0 yesterday.  This site has been running 6.0 since about rc2 (upgrading every release along the way) and I've been very happy with it.  Also, thanks to the developer(s) of the 'Channel Nine' theme, which I've adopted for my own (with some modifications).

Congrats to Drupal for releasing version 6.0 yesterday.  This site has been running 6.0 since about rc2 (upgrading every release along the way) and I've been very happy with it.  Also, thanks to the developer(s) of the 'Channel Nine' theme, which I've adopted for my own (with some modifications).

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pllolcode/ Do I really need to say more?

In exactly two months - April 14th - I'm doing a scalability tutorial at the MySQL conference.

It'll, of course, be based on the material I've been throwing around since 2001, but once again it's greatly expanded, extended and improved! It should be lots of fun.

I've yet to hear anyone tell me that they wasted their time with this particular session and I don't think people are just being polite because I'm often told that people find it tremendously useful. So go sign up already. And don't pay any attention to Brian Aker and …