The Wall Street Journal today, in an article on Sun's recent announcement, reported that MySQL has achieved an estimated 70 million downloads so far.  That's a pretty impressive result and puts MySQL up there with the top products out there, open source or not.  And the momentum is growing with MySQL 5.0.  In the first three weeks we had more than a million downloads.  Thank you to all the MySQL users and supporters out there for making MySQL so popular.  And congratulations to a great worldwide development team!

The news from Sun is that they are continuing in their adoption of open source by offering their Java Enterprise …

Larry Ellison, billionaire CEO of Oracle Corporation, has recently agreed to donate $100 million to charities.  The donation is part of a settlement recently approved by a California judge.  Ellison will have up to 90 days to identify the recipient of the donation and will have up to 5 years to make the donation.  Sounds like a win-win situation for Larry and the charities.

• CNet: …

Every month MySQL sends out a newsletter to several hundred thousand users of MySQL.  The newsletter features technical articles, product announcements, partner news, case studies, conference information and more.  If you're using MySQL and are not subscribed, you should!

• MySQL: Newsletter subscription
• MySQL: Newsletter back issues

We were quite chuffed to see the latest issue of Linux Magazine featuring MySQL 5.0 on the cover.  There's an interview with Marten Mickos, an article on MySQL 5.0 as well as a bonus online interview with Monty.  The links below also lead to several good online articles on MySQL Cluster, understanding the query cache, replication tips and tricks and more.  Check it out! 

• Linux Magazine: Interview with Monty
• Linux Magazine: Articles on MySQL

Connector/NET 1.0.7 has been released.

It is available at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/1.0.html

This looks like a bugfix release, so if you have encountered any bugs in a previous version you may want to upgrade.

Kudos to Reggie for another great release!

Although it's short notice, folks in the New York metro area may be interested in attending the MySQL Meetup in New York tonight Monday November 7th 6:00 pm at:

A&M Roadhouse
57 Murray Street (Between Church St and West Broadway)
New York, NY 10007

CEO Marten Mickos will be there as well as other MySQLers to celebrate the arrival of MySQL 5.0.

There are also other meetups happening routinely in Boston, Seattle, London, Brisbane, Stuttgart, Chicago, San Francisco and other major cities around the world.  The events are usually pretty informal with lots of good MySQL technical discussions, beer or coffee, etc.  It's a great opportunity to meet with other MySQL users and occasionally some of the developers of MySQL.  And did you know that Meetup us powered by MySQL?

• Meetup.com: …

We're coming onto the last call for papers at the 2006 MySQL Users Conference.  That's right, get your submissions in by November 7.  Since the conference team is normally swamped with papers that come in during the last 24 hours, you do get a bit of a competitive edge if you get your paper in early.  Also be sure to target your talk to the audience.  Pick the track that you want to focus on and make sure your presentation includes practical information that is helpful to MySQL users, not just theory.  Topics that show real world use, best practices and showcase unique capabilities of MySQL tend to be very popular.  Hands on information, technical details, performance tips, tuning & optimization, use of new features in 5.0 or MySQL Cluster are always welcome, as are meaty …

JBoss & Microsoft have teamed up to work together on various technical initiatives around ActiveDirectory and web services.  This was quite a surprising move, but it demonstrates that we're moving into an era of greater cooperation between open source and closed source, rather than an "all or nothing" proposition.  While the early proponents of open source have been driven by a sometimes religious-like devotion, for many users of open source technology, it's simply that open source is better: it's easier to use, faster, cheaper, more secure.  But they don't always get to chose all the software in their environment, so there is still the need to co-exist with various closed source pieces.  Still, I imagine there are probably a few people in Redmond who are pissed off about this, since J2EE competes directly with .NET as a runtime environment.

We've always taken a pragmatic approach to platform vendors at MySQL.  We …

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/26/award_nominations/

Florian Mueller, one of my acquaintances from MySQL has been nominated for his work against European Software Patents as European of the year. Pretty heady!

He mentions the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) in a statement. At OSCON this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Hartmut Pilch, the president of the FFII. He seems like a good guy and he is single-minded about his convictions.

If you feel, as I do, that Florian would make a better European Of The Year than UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, vote for him here:

http://www.ev50.com/poll/

Well, we are getting very close indeed to a production release of MySQL 5. Today MySQL is releasing MySQL 5.0.13, a Release Candidate (formerly known as Gamma) version.

You can read all about it at http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article_959.html, but here's the feature highlights:

The new ANSI SQL features include:

• Views (both read-only and updatable views)
• Stored Procedures and Stored Functions, using the SQL:2003 syntax, which is also used by IBM's DB2
• Triggers (row-level)
• Server-side cursors (read-only, non-scrolling)

Implementing ANSI SQL standard ways of using existing MySQL features means there will be fewer unpleasant surprises ("gotchas") for those …