As one can imagine I've been getting a lot of questions about the Sun acquisition.

"Will you still blog?"

"Will MySQL be rewritten in Java"

"Can I get a picture of you in the "Java, the best replacement for Cobol" t-shirt?"

I also hear things. Good stories about Sun, bad stories about Sun. A lot of past history on poor attempts at open source libraries which people still think are current.

A lot of very happy people over Open Office's existence.

Someone asked me if Sun was likely to be sold to Microsoft (huh?).

What no one has asked me so far is what should an open source advocate/programmer going into Sun should try to do.

In general I believe strongly in a combination of "let a thousand flowers bloom" and "be afraid to die until you win some victory for humanity".

More open source is good; software patents kill …

Day 2 for me started with watching Simon Phipps talk about Sun’s FOSS Philosophy and Strategy. It rained in the morning, so the talk started a little late, and there were hopes of better attendance. Nonetheless, the talk was interesting, and the announcement that there was money in it for FOSS developers, was just fabulous. I took away a few points, which I ended up Twittering:

• There’s this idea of a global mesh nowadays, and its leading to a changing society. FOSS is all about it. And “Its Going Mainer Mainstream”!
• Investment in skills is important for any country. There should always be a …

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 …

Singapore. Last stop of my world tour. Shortly after my arrival, the new Lunar Year began. The year of the rat was happily celebrated, and its symbols can be seen everywhere in town.


In Singapore, the Freedom To Work Anywhere @ MySQL has a new meaning. Most of the town is connected via a free wireless net. While sitting on a public bench (in cool evenings) or while enjoying food and drinks at hawker centers and cafes, you can just fire up your laptop, connect to the free wireless, and start browsing. You will need to get a (free) username and password through your mobile, but you can live with it easily.
I am on vacation, so I am not "working from anywhere", but the ubiquity of the wireless connection was hard to resist!
By the way, in case you were wondering if the Sun acquisition …

Last week, we held a conference for leading financial and industry analysts from around the world. My keynote presentation is below - broken into two parts for ease of viewing. One analyst remarked, "but this is pretty much what you said last year."

I responded with, "That's the point."

If you'd like more specifics on our financial performance (directly from Mike Lehman, our CFO), views from the marketplace (from Don Grantham, our Global Sales and Services) or specific product roadmaps (from the heads of our Systems or Software businesses), just click here...)

A lot of people have repeatedly asked me why I’ve not mentioned my thoughts on the Sun-MySQL acquisition (and this blog post, clearly comes almost a month later). I’ve just been pre-occupied and have not had the time to come up with a lengthy blog post. I can however, recommend the following video, created by Mike Lischke, of MySQL Workbench fame.

Naturally, you should also read the Q&A Session with Marten Mickos, that was mostly whipped up almost immediately after the acquisition. Editorial kudos on that one goes to Lenz Grimmer, Steve Curry, and Zack Urlocker. I pretty much had those thoughts that Marten answered really …

The table t is defined thus:

  CREATE TABLE t (
   id INT NOT NULL,
   data CHAR(30) DEFAULT NULL,
   UNIQUE (id, data)
  );

You now do…

  INSERT INTO t VALUES (1, NULL);

Which causes one row to be inserted into the table. Keeping in mind that the UNIQUE index spans across both columns, what would happen if you were to repeat the INSERT command?
Spanish translation by Marcos Besteiro
(more…)

Since 2005, every year we have done some kind of "Mayflower weekend". As we're a bit of a distributed company (departments in Munich and Würzburg, called Herbipolis, several "on-site departments" at some of our biggest customers, an offshore department in beautiful Argentinia and since 2007 a sister company called SektionEins located at Cologne watching out for Web Security) it's always fun packing the crowd together and putting them into a hotel somewhere in Germany (or Barcelona, Spain in 2006 and Budapest, Hungary in 2007). If you followed Wolfram's blog you noticed that we also had some external guests (if you need a Dojo freelancer, I recommend hiring Wolfram although he's a Pythoneer ;-) ) alongside the camp. The event was located at the hotel …

One of the workshops on our Barcamp two weeks ago had to do with the MySQL-Proxy from Jan Kneschke.

Yet, we found out, that the proxy is rather unuseable for our task. Read here why.

Continue reading "Playing arround with the MySQL-Proxy on Mayflower-barcamp"

I’ve been giving presentations at work each week about MySQL DBA topics. An hour of speaking about the things one does on a daily basis is rather fun, and hopefully spreads the work about how efficient MySQL is to administer and setup, as well as optimize and troubleshoot vs MSSQL and Oracle - for which we also have weekly classes.

Recently I’ve been covering backup and recovery methods, which brings me to my next point - the talkback scripts I have been integrating into my Monolith application. These scripts are wrappers for mysqldump that do extensive error checking for file completion, directory pruning to rotate out old backups per the backup retention period policy, and then report back via email and to a separate database for tracking purposes.

Here is the create table for the reporting aspect. Note: this is part of the Monolith 1.2 release which is still in beta. Stay tuned for the release that includes this, as well as …