Unless you've been coding under a blogosphere rock  you've heard that NCover has now gone commercial.  NCover has become a staple in many developer toolboxes.  I can understand this move.  People are so busy today that it's becoming increasingly hard to get people to contribute time to a good open source project.  And even fewer contribute money.  Unless you are functionally wealthy (read: actually wealthy or a nothing-better-to-do college kid), finding the time to significantly push projects forward can be daunting.

So the guys behind NCover and NCoverExplorer have banded together and formed a new organization named Gnoso.  Their first product is NCover 2.0 (now up to 2.0.1) and is available in x32 professional and x64 enterprise editions.

While the prices of these two products are fair, I …

Microsoft says that Visual Studio packages are binary compatible from 2005 so any packages that loaded successfully into VS 2005 should work in VS 2008.  Err, no.  At least not with VS 2008 beta 2.  I admit it didn't take much of a change to fix things, but it wasn't seamless.

So, I just committed a patch to our trunk repository that enables Connector/Net in VS 2008 beta 2.  Here's a shot of it running.

This trunk repository will eventually be our 5.2 release and you can grab a sneak peek by pulling a snapshot from here. 

I probably don't spend quite enough time following progress around MySQL considering how critical the product is to us. I'd like to consider it part of the infrastructure in a way I treat Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ie something I can trust to make good progress and follow up on a quarterly basis. Naturally we have people who watch both much more closely, but my time simply should, and pretty much is, spent doing something else.

However, it seems MySQL really demands a bit more attention right now. Today I went and read Jeremy Cole's opinion about MySQL Community (a failure), and I have to say I agree on many of the points. MySQL simply has not yet found a model that works as well as that of Red Hat's Fedora vs Enterprise …

Craig Mullins has weathered a very heavy week in the ’sphere and published the 63rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, on Data Management Today. Log Buffer’s dance-card is almost empty now. LB wants your attentions! If you’re a new database blogger, editing and publishing an edition of LB on your [...]

Recently I have been taking a serious look at stored procedures in MySQL and, in particular, how I might go about implementing them in my website and, in particular, where they could be used and why. At present, I have really only gotten my feet wet with using stored procedures, but I think that is enough to make some conclusions that I thought might be helpful to others that are starting to look at stored procedures as well.

One of my initial impressions is that, if you have never used stored procedures before, it seems to be slightly daunting at first. Stored procedures in MySQL basically use standard SQL syntax, but I found myself using some of the lesser used SQL structures (such as IF and WHEN statements as well as session variable handling). The MySQL documentation on stored procedures focuses directly on them and does not really cover the …

Wednesday

MySQL AB’s developer meeting lasts an entire week. The community days, as they call it, are only on Thursday and Friday, but Lenz asked me to come on Wednesday night for the get-together then. I arrived five minutes after they all left without a trace.

Thursday

The developer meeting is organzied like proper conference. There are different sessions to go to in different rooms, coffee breaks and everything. The morning sessions are actual team meetings while in the afternoon there are MySQL University lessons.

MySQL University is a weekly installment where a smart person lectures about a hot topic in the MySQL world (NDB Architecture, Using BitKeeper, Running MySQL with a debugger just to name a few). They started out as MySQL internal training courses, but …

Could the two possibly go together? Oracle rocked another quarter: this is a behemoth that clearly knows how to execute.

At the same time, Oracle's Larry Ellison has nixed the idea that software as a service is worth getting out of bed for. Instead, Oracle believes selling more (and different) widgets to the same customers it already has is a winning strategy:

What I'd like to highlight here is the radically different strategies of the two companies (SAP and Oracle) for growth. Our strategy for growth is to find a way to add more value to the same customers we already serve, which are the large end of the mid-market and large companies. What we're doing here is moving beyond ERP to industry specific …

I know I’ve been away from the MySQL community for a bit….my hand injury is healing nicely, and I was able to concentrate time on things that required less typing and more mouse clicking. One such thing was the site overhaul of http://www.technocation.org to be easier to use on my side for things like embedding video and mp3 files. More user friendly for you, with regards to article names. Please feel free to vote on whether you like the new site (poll is at the top of the home page, or direct link at http://technocation.org/content/do-you-new-technocation-site%3F). You can add a comment to the poll, too, if you want to voice your opinion.

I do hope to get back into podcasting, and have one for next week. Coming very soon: Videos from MySQL Camp!

This release of MySQL Toolkit adds a new tool, fixes some minor bugs, and adds new functionality to several of the tools.

With any code base of a reasonable size there are lots of issues you would normally take care of immediately when you come across them, however often there is just no time for it. In the end you will have to live with the knowledge that you had to leave some ugly hacks in it just to meet the deadline.

Because we have recently finished development of the next major release of our software product, there is some time now to do code cleanup and get some more automated tests on the way. Because one of the bugs that almost prevented us from holding our schedule was a particularly nasty - but well hidden one - there has (again) been some discussion about coding guidelines and quality.

People always seem to agree that you need to talk to each other, think in larger terms than just your specific problem at the time and strive for code readability and re-usability. For starters I personally would sometimes even do away with just a little …