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 …

Even though MySQL is an open source company, there are some areas where we could do a better job being even more open. One of these is more regular publication of database benchmarks. Oddly enough, it's an area where MySQL shines.

When I joined MySQL in 2003, one of the reasons that attracted me was that even without a lot of marketing, it was clear what the major advantages of our products were: performance, reliability and ease of use. And of course, MySQL is open source. Those product characteristics were reinforced whenever I spoke to customers, partners and employees about MySQL. There were also some good outside proofpoints such as a benchmark by eWeek that provided credible third-party validation. We weren't just drinking our own Kool-Aid, so to …

This summer, C++ gone wild. These are brilliant:

int Log_event::read_log_event(IO_CACHE* file, String* packet,
                              pthread_mutex_t* log_lock)

and

#ifndef MYSQL_CLIENT
Log_event* Log_event::read_log_event(IO_CACHE* file,
                                     pthread_mutex_t* log_lock,
                                     bool old_format)
#else
Log_event* Log_event::read_log_event(IO_CACHE* file, bool old_format)
#endif

and

Log_event* Log_event::read_log_event(const char* buf, int event_len,
                                     const char **error, bool old_format)
        

Save me.

Yesterday, at the MySQL User Conference 2005, I hosted a Birds of a Feather session on MySQL and GIS. I spoke with a couple of guys from Trakm8, a company from Dorset, England. They have a very fascinating system built on top of MySQL’s GIS support and some of their custom tracking devices. They showed me their software and we discussed their platform. I gave them some (hopefully useful) tips regarding MySQL.

Their system includes an embedded PC, a GPS, and a GPRS modem (cell phone), and given some power is able to track a vehicle (or anything else) anywhere within coverage of the cell network. This is exactly the kind of people and projects/products I was hoping to get at my BoF session. As an aside, there’s a …