Microsoft has an offer open-source startups are having a hard time refusing. Should they?

(Credit: Microsoft (Sam Ramji))

That's the question I asked myself while reading Mary Jo Foley's excellent article that dissects Microsoft's open-source strategy. As it turns out, it's very similar to Microsoft's general partner strategy: embrace and envelope. (Or embrace, extend, and extinguish, as used to be Microsoft's marching orders.)

Microsoft is looking at open-source software (OSS) as just another flavor of independent software vendors (ISV) software. Microsoft's goal is to convince OSS vendors to port their software to Windows. But Microsoft doesn't want OSS software to just sit on top of Windows; the company wants this software to be tied into the Windows …

Welcome to the 82nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Some MySQL news to start. They call the engine Maria. “They” being MySQL AB co-founder Monty Widenius, and Maria being his new storage engine for MySQL. On his new blog, Monty Says, Monty says Maria is, “. . . a crash-safe alternative [...]

1. Zend and Microsoft have done a lot of work in the last year to make PHP run well on Windows. I never understood why Microsoft devoted resources to that, but now it is clear: it's going to make technical integration between the two organizations go much more smoothly.
2. This will hopefully be the death knell of the awful "Windows Live" branding for consumer web stuff.
3. Maybe now somebody will release a .NET OpenID 2.0 library that actually works.
4. Big losers here from a tech supplier perspective: FreeBSD and MySQL.
5. Another potential big loser is Adobe; having a gigantic global audience will help with adoption of Microsoft's various Adobe-killing initiatives like Silverlight, which would never otherwise have penetrated the consumer web without a large built-in audience like Yahoo's.

…

1. Zend and Microsoft have done a lot of work in the last year to make PHP run well on Windows. I never understood why Microsoft devoted resources to that, but now it is clear: it's going to make technical integration between the two organizations go much more smoothly.
2. This will hopefully be the death knell of the awful "Windows Live" branding for consumer web stuff.
3. Maybe now somebody will release a .NET OpenID 2.0 library that actually works.
4. Big losers here from a tech supplier perspective: FreeBSD and MySQL.
5. Another potential big loser is Adobe; having a gigantic global audience will help with adoption of Microsoft's various Adobe-killing initiatives like Silverlight, which would never otherwise have penetrated the consumer web without a large built-in audience like Yahoo's.

…

… or, “Making Event Attendance Count”

Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I didn’t) then a naive estimation of costs would have been something like this:

• ~20 000 km of air travel (Vancouver to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Helsinki. Return.)
• ~7 000+ CAD of costs (flights, hotels, taxis, meals, time) (borne by a combination of eZ Systems, the Mozilla Foundation and the …

Is 2008 going to be the Year of the Acquisition? Activity in 2007 was on the rise but now things seem to be at full speed.

• I remember when Alta Vista and Excite! were the hot search engines, my how the world has changed.  It looks like it’s narrowing down to a two horse race with Microsoft putting the moves on Yahoo! for about $44.6 billion (Notes from SearchEngineLand). I guess it’s really on now, Google versus Microsoft in a search engine death match.
• Yahoo! acquired Zimbra last year. I wonder …

MySQL 5.1 offers an extremely useful feature called information schema plug-ins. This feature allows dynamic runtime loading of a shared library into the MySQL server to implement a table in the information_schema database. The SQL standard (ISO/IEC 9075-11:2003) allows database implementations to extend the information_schema. MySQL 5.1 transfers the possibility to do this directly to privileged database users so they can extend the information_schema themselves, in any way they see fit.

In this article, we will demonstrate how to create a minimal "Hello, World!" MySQL information schema plugin. In a forthcoming article, we'll demonstrate how …

MySQL's Certification exams are given in Pearson VUE test centers or at the MySQL Users Conference. Ignoring the numbers from the UC, the growth in exams taken last year was impressive. The Americas and EMEA grew at 25% and 26%. Pacific grew 91%. And in Japan we grew an amazing 166%!

The UC numbers are numbing by themselves. We will be printing in the neighborhood of 500+ exams to cover the six testing periods during the conference. Considering how exciting the speakers and presentations are, having that many people dedicate time in a relatively small room to sit demanding exams is impressive.

Meetup.com has lots of MySQL users groups sponsored by MySQL itself. Look for a group near you at www.meetup.com or start one.

I have been trying for the past few months to get the North Texas MySQL Meetup Group rolling. One member who made our first meeting was able to use some knowledge he learned to help earn a Paypal Certified Developer Certification shortly before he got a new job. Sadly the new job kept him away from the last meeting.

If you are in or around Dallas / Fort Worth, we will be in the Starbucks inside the Barns & Noble at the Southlake Town Center (Hwy 114 & Carroll Ave) Monday February 4th at 7PM. Look for me in the tan MySQL baseball hat. If we swamp the Starbucks, we'll move someplace like Joe's Pizza where spirited talk about buffer caches or row locking is not shocking. Well welcome all levels of curiosity and experience.

In June 2007, I became a Certified MySQL 5.0 DBA. A couple of days ago, decided to see what was in the account at http://www.mysql.com/certification/candidate/. It's possible to create special account for people who want verify my certification. I think it's useful, for example, during interview with the employer.

Interesting statistics http://www.mysql.com/certification/candidates.php?exam=4. In Ukraine, only 3 people, including me, who are certified as MySQL 5.0 DBA. Apparently IT market is not in need of MySQL DBA and this is confirmed by Ukrainian job sites. I met only one vacancy, which assumed duties as the work solely as a DBA.