Horay, one of my talks for the MySQL Conference 2008 has been accepted! So after one year off, it appears I'll be going to Santa Clara again - for the first time under my own OpenQuery banner.

Deadly Sins Using MySQL & PHP is a fun interactive session about things one should not do ;-)

It'll also be good to meet up again with lots of familiar faces and friends - community as well as former colleagues. Cool.

In the past few months, we have completed some important core development initiatives, while at the same time adding additional features to opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM. The significant developments include the following:

1. Building out a set of cross-application unit tests to verify the correctness of key areas such as order management, inventory, purchasing, and accounting.
2. Improved e-mail processing and management features. Customer service e-mails can now be associated with orders and assigned to different reps for processing.
3. Improved the use of form letters for generating outgoing e-mails and communications.
4. Support for managing resellers and partners, including contact information, agreements and contracts, and invoicing partners based on their sales activity.
5. Completed most of the documentation site for opentaps …

One perhaps not-so-expected attendee at the MySQL-Sun Integration Kickoff is Josh Berkus, of PostgreSQL fame.

Zack Urlocker, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart and Josh Berkus.

Josh gives valuable feedback within the Community track of the Integration Kickoff. Mind you, Jonathan Schwartz has reiterated Sun’s support for PostgreSQL:

What happens to your commitment to PostgreSQL?

It grows. The day before we announced the acquisition, and within an hour of signing the deal, I put a call into Josh Berkus, who leads our work with Postgres inside of Sun. I wanted to be as clear as I could: this transaction increases our investment in open source, and in open source databases. And increases our commitment to Postgres - and the database industry broadly. The same goes for our work with Apache Derby, and our JavaDB.

Josh says it exactly right on his blog - Sun …

A

Several years ago (looking at archive.org it was at the end of 2001) I wrote a database that translated IPs to locations. Very similar to the city-db from maxmind.com. Perhaps someone still remembers the article in the iX about it ?

Anyway, now it is time to release the idea to the public. The idea is a distributed, open-source IP to location translation. Source comes later.

The basic idea

The idea behind IP-to-location translation is pretty old already. For I stumbled over it when I was running traceroute to some IP addresses on IRC. If you are in city-specific channels, you can easy proof if the basic idea works or not.

# traceroute -w 1 -q 1 …

Totally expectable, the sun has gone up and down for the past two weeks since Sun bought MySQL for $1 billion and we still trust in MySQL – do we trust in Sun?

In fact, Sun paid a high premium for MySQL’s credibility (aka brand value) to benefit from the high profile of the cute dolphin publicly. MySQL simply knows how to play the Open Source game right, that’s their largest asset. How high is it actually?

Let’s look at MySQL’s reputation management:

• MySQL is everybody’s Open Source darling. Their consistent brand design created trust and allowed for the amortization of goodwill.
• In the past 5 years, there was no proof of the viability of an Open Source business model without mentioning MySQL. MySQL is an Open Source thought leader.
• MySQL is the M in LAMP. Any doubts?

…

We are working hard on the next Workbench Beta release that should be out mid next week. It will include a list of top priority bug fixes as usual but also two new additions that have been requested by our beta testers.

The new Online Update menu item allows to update your current installation to the latest available release right from within the tool. No need manually browse web pages anymore - at least if you are using the MSI based packages. The reason we are not offering this for the zip packages is that an automatic update is tricky since you might have made a custom install based on your needs. If you are using the zip packages you can keep using the normal Version Check menu item that will inform you about the version you have installed and if a new release is available.

The second addition is a better reporting after schema diffs. We added the templating engine (thanks Google for ctemplate!) …

Yesterday here at the MySQL-Sun Integration Kickoff, MySQL Co-Founder Michael “Monty” Widenius and I met with Sun’s CTO Greg Papadopoulos. For the beginning of the meeting, also Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz popped in.

And just as when the founders met Sun’s Rich Lang and David Douglas prior to the agreement being announced, this was a very positive meeting. Lots of mutual respect, and lots of mutual interest in listening to what the other party has to say. Relaxed atmosphere, full of anticipation.

The areas touched upon ranged from the right for developers to spend time on other FOSS projects besides MySQL, over the newly released Maria storage engine to possibilities for deep technical integration between MySQL and Sun’s software and hardware.

I could sense a mutual hunger for action, for change, and for making things happen. …

I've been dealing with a security product from a security company in recent days that breaks best practices with respect to the database configuration. This has reminded me of the list of issues I've seen over the past six months that have raised my ire. I'll rail mostly at products that use SQL Server as the back-end, but I'll save the last example for one that uses MySQL. It's not the database products that are weak. It's the application implementation on them!

Case #1: Don't EVER use SA and don't enable the network if you don't have to!

This said security product recommends the use of SQL Server if you are using it on over 1,000 users. Okay, no problem. It wants its own instance. Okay... that raises a flag in and of itself. Is performance really that bad? Well, no, not likely. Here's the kicker:

To install the application you must use the sa account. Not a service account with sysadmin rights …

I have seen too many date fields that have been named after reserved key words that I need to make an entry for this... It's like naming your kid "Kid". Wait a sec... that's happened many times before as well.I will make a "Proper Naming Conventions" page for mySQL after checking a few more sources first, but this date naming issue cannot wait another day.Thus..First Rule: Do not use a reserved