Earlier this month I took a look at Fortune’s tips for initial public offerings in 2008 and passed comment on the open source-related contenders. Given the events of the past ten days or so it is worth taking another look at the open source vendors that might make IPO candidates between now and the turn of the decade.

Once again I should note that I have no knowledge of the IPO plans of these companies beyond that which is presented below, and the assessment of their potential is my own.

Ingres

Ingres has confirmed that it intends to file for IPO in 2008. It had expected to follow MySQL, but will now be the first open source database …

I really like the 21st century open source technology community. 20 years ago, if a company bought out another company, everyone would have their own island of opinions and response, and you would not know if you were on-track or even if the publicized reports were on-track either.Today, it is amazing to see the responses around the boards and blogs, which seems to keep the mainstream reports

Data Warehousing Continued

Part of the reason I was hired by my company was to help the company?s largest customer connect their data warehouse to the company?s website database. I have data basing experience but I have never been involved in such a large project (don?t tell my bosses). Luckily for me, I wont be doing everything, but for starters, I had to get some customer data, mainly email addresses and build a newsletter mailing list. Sounds simple enough..
Unfortunately for me, I had no idea how difficult it is to take even simple data fields from 2-3 sources and merge it into one. Some of the systems were so old, that back when they recorded the email address, there were no validation rules to enforce the input from the users. I saw emails like this http://www.163.com@yingying837.cn (163.com is a Chinese email server). It seemed to me that the people who inputted this email address only recently purchased a computer.
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When you connect a Linux server to a SAN, the network driver will present the available SAN partition as normal SCSI drives. This can be more complicated when more than one Fiber Channel paths are involved. Let’s consider a server having two FC adapters (or a dual port one) and a SAN having two FC channels. For this server, each SAN partitions will appear four times but some FC adapter drivers, like the QLogic ones, will filter them out.

If you are using another brand of Fiber Channel adapters, like Emulex, you will see all of them. I recently worked on a MySQL project using 9 SAN partitions so I ended up dealing with 36 SCSI devices (/dev/sdb to /dev/sdao). Dealing with so many devices is not a fun task, especially if the order of the disks is not preserved between after a reboot. My first attempt to deal with this problem was to use partition label and mount partition by label. Although this solution worked, it was slow and I sometimes …

Yet Another Sun Bought MySQL Post

So Sun bought MySQL?. dunno about you, but I was surprised. My first impression was ?nooooooooooooooo, I liked it when it was small and my contributions made a difference?, but I realized that it has obvious big advantages.

The main one, which has been mentioned over and over again, is the support of MySQL will grow to the level which I might see it in companies that opted not to get it and use commercial databases.

When I was interviewed for my current job, I learnt that the company made a website for a large customer and that they were using MySQL along side open source frameworks for it. The customer would want in the future to integrate the data, the website gathers, to their CRM system. Because of that, they were thinking about moving to using Oracle. They were also thinking of moving to Oracle anyway, because and I quote ?we have more then 500 views a day on the …

Heh, who knew we'd see the day that Gartner would write this:Recommendations for all enterprises
...
MySQL is capable of supporting clusters, delivering atomic, consistent, isolated and durable (ACID) functionality and handling some mission-critical applications. Evaluate MySQL as an alternative to IBM DB2, Oracle and other DBMSs.Well, fact of the matter is, they did write it in a recent report on the MySQL / Sun deal. You can download the Gartner analysis right here free of charge.

A few weeks after the latest useful quiz, I want to offer a funny one.
Given the following table, on a MySQL server 5.1.22 or newer,

CREATE TABLE t1 (id int, c char(100)) engine=MyISAM;

1. Create one set of three triggers that must all be activated BEFORE INSERT.
   
   • Upon insertion of the values (1, 'nothing'), the first trigger should replace 'nothing' with 'something', leaving the number unchanged;
   • the second trigger should add ' more ';
   • the third trigger should add '!!'.
2. Create one set of three more triggers, all activated BEFORE INSERT.
   
   • Upon insertion of the values (1,'nothing') the first trigger should add 10 to the number, leaving the text unchanged.
   • the second trigger should add 100 to the number;
   • the …

It's been almost a month now since I have been evaluating JasperServer. And it has been quite hard to evaluate the software without a proper documentation. Fortunately, I was able to convince my boss to buy the books Definite Guide to iReport, Definite Guide to JasperReport and JasperServer Ultimate Guide.

What I found interesting in all this experience is that just like any open software, it is connected to a lot of different applications. I had to study Tomcat and Ant in a thorough manner to get through JasperServer. In the end, I'm actually quite happy that I had to go through this experience.

Anyway, I am now quite comfortable with JasperServer. I am now able to create reports on the fly and I'm able to understand what it is now doing in a more in-depth manner. In fact, I will be giving a demo to our boss sometime soon and who knows we might use JasperServer in our company.

Helan går sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej. Helan går, sjung hoppfaderallan lej.

Och den som inte helan tar, han ej heller halvan får. Helan går, sjung hopp faderallan lej.

while we start to wind up development of connector/odbc 5.1, i will also be taking on responsibility for libmysql, the c library that defines the client interface to mysql, and the mysql command-line utilities. there are about 120 active bugs in those areas right now, so the first task will be getting that down to a more manageable number.

after that, the field will open up for new development. i know that an asynchronous interface to libmysql is on some people’s wishlist, and there are other areas where i think that libmysql could be cleaned up in general.

but the idea that i think is the most exciting is to build a scripting …