MySQL AB today announced that Flixster and NowPublic -- two of today's hottest Web 2.0 companies -- have selected the MySQL Enterprise database to power their rapidly growing businesses. MySQL continues to expand its presence as the database of choice among the new generation of online companies looking to cost-effectively manage the scalability of their high-growth businesses using proven, high-performance open source software.

I’m starting up a schema to hold stored procedures that automate common DBA tasks. SQL file for import is here: opsmonitor.sql

More SPs will be added in time… whenever I get the time to write them that is.

UPDATE: Jeff Stoner will be heading up this project to contain his scripts, of which the ones currently listed in the first link are written by himself.

Two employees of Sun Finland, Margot Wik (whom I studied French with in the 1980s at the Helsinki University of Technology) and Thomas Branders (another fellow HUT student, from whom I tried to learn how to sing Helan går while having fun at HUT’s Swedish language student corporation Teknologföreningen, but don’t blame him for the end result on YouTube) invited me to Sun Finland’s Friday Coffee Meeting 25.1.2008 at about 14:00. I was happy to accept. It’s only natural to do the inaugural ambassador visit in my native country.

I’m looking forward to learning from Margot, Tomi and their colleagues, and telling them about MySQL!

At the risk of making it seem like this is all we’re talking about here at Pythian, here we go again. Paul Vallee pointed me towards this article by John Dvorak that more or less echoes a blog post I wrote in French the day previous for my personal blog that you can read here: Le [...]

The MySQL All-Company Meeting in Orlando is now over. Many are already back at home (= back at work), and others are in transition. What a meeting!

One of the mildest surprises of the week were the name tags carrying a flag that represented the country of residence, as opposed to nationality. These matters are emotional. While I happen to like Germany, it’s not as if I were German. Teased by others for deserting my native country of Finland, I spent time retaliating at innocent fellow countrymen for their “even more foreign” flag than mine. Max Mether had a French flag. Birgitta Löfberg had a Swedish flag (OK, that’s the least foreign, but still foreign). And, for the largest distance from Finland, Mårten Mickos carried a US flag. Eminently teasable.

Also, on my initial name tag, I had the title “Sr. Director Sales Operations”. However, it turned out not to be an innovative way for …

By Tim O'Reilly

I got two fascinating emails from Jason Hunter over the weekend, both concerning MarkMail, the open source mailing list search engine created by Ryan Grimm and Jason over at MarkLogic. I thought I'd share them, with Jason's permission.

The first was a fairly prosaic announcement:

In the last few weeks we loaded the PHP and PEAR mailing lists, a sum total of about 700,000 new messages. Contained within the new load is the php-general list, now statistically our largest list at 266,000 messages, passing by the old king tomcat-users with its 225,000 messages. Third place now goes to the main MySQL list.

It's great to know that you can now search these lists with the amazing MarkMail tools, which …

I thought I'd get a chance to do some more blogging on Sun's acquisition of MySQL last week, but I was focused internally at our company meeting, spending time with employees and working on our objectives for 2008. Needless to say it was a fun, but exhausting week. We'd been working with Sun on the deal for several weeks, but only a handful of people knew about it. So there were about 400 very surprised employees Wednesday morning when we announced the news. It's a lot of information to digest and we wanted to make sure everyone got answers to... READ MORE

Q. When is a program not a program? A. When it is all the works ever licensed under GPLv3. Via the Software Freedom Law Center comes news that the Free Software Foundation has published a document clarifying its position on patent litigation related to the GPLv3 - specifically what constitutes a program under the GPLv3 for the purposes of patent infringement claims.

According to section 10, paragraph 3 of the GPLv3:

“[Y]ou may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it.”

The new FSF document clarifies …

Now with MySQL AB having been scooped up (as noted by 99% of the blogosphere including myself), what about SAP and open source? IIRC SAP was one of the investors into MySQL AB (not sure how large a chunk they held). SAP really put a lot of weight behind MySQL when they handed over SAP DB (renamed to MaxDB) to MySQL and made it clear that they expect MySQL to be SAP certified any day now (has this happened?).

At the same time SAP has been sending "mixed messages" at best in regards to OSS. And they …