MySQL has announced a new user survey over the holidays.  The survey will take about 15-20 minutes to complete and has questions about how you're using MySQL, what features are important to you and what areas you'd like MySQL to work on.  This is a great way to influence our strategy and directions.  It helps our product managers and engineers focus on the features that are important to you.  And you may even win an iPod Nano in the process! 

• MySQL: User Survey

There's a good blog article on the Xooglers (ex-Googlers) web site about how they use MySQL to run their adwords program.  If you're not familiar, adwords generates something like 99.9% of Google's advertising revenues, so it certainly a business critical application.  While Google is generally quite secretive about their internal operations, there are some interesting tidbits in this posting about how Google tried a commercial, closed-source database but it was never able to perform as well as MySQL.  A few select quotes:

• "AdWords was built using the MySQL database, which is open-source and therefore available for free. It is by now also nearly as full-featured as the best commercial databases, but back in 2000 this was not the case."
• "Many managers seem to have this idea that it is invariably true that you get what you pay for, and that therefore …

So I just finished installing Asterisk at Home 1.5. For some reason I got it into my head back in August before Oscon that I should format the entire asterisk server at the house and start over from scratch. Which means that I have not had a home phone in months. Its arguable if I have ever had one for the house in the first place, I cherish hacking the phone more then it actually being functional. I had been using a fairly early version of asterisk that I had hacked up/patched to do a few oddball things which are now done directly by the server (most of them had to do with fixing it so that all information was loaded from MySQL).

1.5 is definitely better then 1.2, for instance it works. The only bug I have found so far is that if I make changes in the setup I need to go into asterisk via "asterisk -r" and type reload so that all of the changes take place, otherwise it works fine. It took all of a day and a half to reload all of the …

This past week Burlingame, California was host to the first Zend/PHP conference.  The keynotes included presentations by the founders of Zend (Andi, Zeev and Doron), as well as Marc Andreessen (Netscape wunderkind), Rod Smith (IBM's open source guru), Ken Jacobs (Oracle's Dr DBA) and Adam Bosworth (Google) among others.

Zend also announced their initiatives around a collaboration platform for PHP that involves many vendors including MySQL, Oracle, IBM, Actuate and SugarCRM as well as the PHP community at large to develop the Zend PHP framework as well as integration with Eclipse. 

Marc Andreessen's keynote was particularly interesting as he made the case that PHP is really the language going forward.  For those who missed the 1990's (or are still trying to forget it) this is an amazing endorsement both for PHP and for Zend.  …

MySQL 5.0 RC is out. It’s so exciting for me to say that because waiting 3 years for MySQL 5 and finally we have an RC. Wow. I wonder when the prod version will be out. They better release it soon.

Ok, if you don't read Swedish, you might be wondering what the headline above means.  It's a rough translation of "We kill bugs dead" which I used in a presentation to our developers a few months back in Prague.  Since then, it's become somewhat of a mantra in the Engineering team, who are relentless in killing all the bugs they can find.  Which is exactly what we wanted in our MySQL 5.0 release candidate, announced today.  MySQL 5.0 RC has no known showstopper bugs (e.g. Priority 1 or 2 bugs) and no reported bugs from our Beta testers. 

I'm sure there are still a few weird corner cases lurking here or there, but it's solid enough for production use at this stage and we're encouraging folks to take it out for serious usage.  In fact, we'll be giving away prizes for the …

A couple of weeks ago, MySQL got our first Intel based Macintosh machines.  Very cool!  Unlike Adobe's expereince, in just a few hours, we were able to recompile MySQL 5.0 beta using the standard GCC compiler, get it linked with the appropriate Mac Intel libraries and get the server up and running.  So far, performance is fantastic!  (And this is a beta release on a beta platform!) (Actually, we've also been able to run MySQL on Longhorn with a recompile, so perhaps this has more to do with our code than with the platform itself.) 

Nonetheless, the Mac platform has won a lot of hearts and minds of open source developers.  At any open source conference, I see a ton of Mac laptops since it's running Unix with a great GUI.  A lot of our developers at MySQL are absolute Mac heads and I think we'll …

PHP remains the most popular language for MySQL users.  Not only is it used for scripting web applications, it's used in a broad range of very scalable enterprise applications, content systems, interactive applications and more.  Zend is one of the leading companies in this space founded by PHP 4 co-authors Zeev Suraski and Andi Guttmans.  They're going to be celebrating 10 years of PHP at the Zend PHP 05 conference in the bay area October 17-21.  There are quite a few good keynotes and presentations there including one by JD Duncan, ace MySQL consultant, who will showcase some pretty interesting work done at CNet using MySQL and PHP together.  This promises to be a great conference and I …

Here's an update on the Open Source EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) front as reported a few months back.  Looks like some of the leading open source projects will be merging into one big daddy project.  A combination of ServiceMix (Enterprise Service Bus and SOA Toolkit), Apache Synapse (Web Services Broker) and Celtix (Iona's open source EAI project).  Ioana and LogicBlaze, two commercial companies behind Celtix and ServiceMix, are expected to make the announcement in September. 

One thing that happens fairly rapidly in the open source world is that good projects get momentum quickly.  So I think this is a …

Zimbra, previously known as Liquid Systems, is starting to emerge from stealth mode.  Last week at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, they exhibited in the MySQL booth (along with other LAMP based applications and partners) showing off their new open source email solution.  Maybe open source email seems like old hat to some folks, but Microsoft Exchange has a lock on IT managers around the world, and Zimbra is fully exchange compatible. It has its own rich web client and is also fully compatible with Outlook as well as any POP3 or IMAP email client. 

What that means is IT managers can start using Zimbra in conjunction with their existing exchange servers and get the full benefit of email and calendaring at a fraction of the price of Microsoft's closed source …