I'm really grateful to Zack Urlocker for his post today on how MySQL competes against Google et al in the hiring department. More importantly (for me), he discusses how MySQL closes the distance its employees may feel while working in a highly distributed company:

So that means that they don't have to commute, they don't have to hang out in boring HR meetings, they can just focus on what they like, which is coding. We may not have all the perks offered by big companies, but at the end of the day, developers know they are working on something important and they can do it from their home rather than relocating to Silicon Valley....

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If you're a private open source company, how do you compete against the likes of Google or VMWare for talent? At MySQL, we've found that one of the most attractive elements of the company is the fact that we are globally distributed. We have over 300 employees in nearly 30 countries. (That's in total, not 300 in each!) And over 70% of employees work from home. Among developers, the rate is over 90%. So that means that they don't have to commute, they don't have to hang out in boring HR meetings, they can just focus on what they like,... READ MORE

I was glad to have the opportunity to join the MySQL developers in Heidelberg for a few days, so thanks to MySQL for the invitation. In between great food, quite a few beers and a number of boat trips we managed to get a significant amount of work done!

In what could be considered a follow-up to the engine summit at Google following the MySQL User's conference, I joined Calvin Sun, Brian Aker, Jeffrey Pugh, Monty and others from MySQL and the engine developing community to discuss things concerning storage engines.

One of the main topics of the meeting was features and other changes to the MySQL front-end as required by the engines. Some of the requirements (such as an interface to the MySQL optimizer) would really …

After almost eight months of waiting, I am finally allowed to publish my thesis paper:

Design and Implementation of a Workflow Engine
This thesis discusses the design and implementation of a software component that faciliates the specification, management, and execution of so-called workflows. The discussion of this component's design includes the semantics and syntax of the underlying workflow model as well as the actual software design. The former builds upon the Workflow Patterns [BK03] terminology, the latter on the concepts of a Workflow Virtual Machine [SF04] and the idea that a workflow system should be comprised of loosely coupled components [DAM01, DG95, PM99].

The thesis paper is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Germany license, the software that has been developed as part of this thesis has been released under the New BSD License as part of …

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Sometimes, you forget simple concepts when your head is deep into the waters of solving other problems.

I dealt with a problem this weekend that was the result of code I wrote that we use for regression testing. The code is designed with a fairly simple concept: run all of our feeds and take the output of how Grazr Feed Server code parses (that the website/widget sees), store into MySQL the md5_hex of the OPML and JSON in a table for a known good version. Then, you update the code to the new test version, create a table with the same schema as the results for the known good version, run the regression again with the new code. When the regression for the new code is completed, then you compare the two tables.

The problem that I encountered was that I was performing a join against records that only existed for both data sets. Say for instance, I run regression for the known good version and produce 30,000 records. Then I …

Actually let me address the items in the topic in reverse order. I have added support for recaptcha. I actually never got spam on this wiki, but I got plenty of it on my wiki (the observant of you will note that my wiki has also changed url as of today, but the old address will just redirect). So I decided to give this a try. I also finished the last round of he Swiss Coed Championships in Ultimate Frisbee this weekend. Unfortunately we did not manage to upset the favorites in the final, so we placed 2nd. I wasn't really happy with my throwing. I do know why this happend, so I will have to mark it as lesson learned. But I made a few nice dives which were caught on video, which I will hope will make it into the web soon.

Finally I made a few notes while attending the MySQL …

Actually let me address the items in the topic in reverse order. I have added support for recaptcha. I actually never got spam on this wiki, but I got plenty of it on my wiki (the observant of you will note that my wiki has also changed url as of today, but the old address will just redirect). So I decided to give this a try. I also finished the last round of he Swiss Coed Championships in Ultimate Frisbee this weekend. Unfortunately we did not manage to upset the favorites in the final, so we placed 2nd. I wasn't really happy with my throwing. I do know why this happend, so I will have to mark it as lesson learned. But I made a few nice dives which were caught on video, which I will hope will make it into the web soon.

Finally I made a few notes while attending the MySQL …

It makes me sad that not more was done to promote this, and I sure didn't do enough either. Well, I did email the Belgian user group members.

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/events/emea-conference-2007/

* London, Tuesday, October 16th 2007
* Munich, Thursday, October 18th 2007
* Paris, Tuesday, October 23rd 2007

I can't attend all of them, but I'll try to go to Paris.

Tell your friends! Let us show there are people in Europe interested in these!

Some time ago, I announced the MySQL UDF Repository. In short, the MySQL UDF Repository tries to be a one stop place to obtain high quality LGPL licensed libraries containing MySQL UDFs, including documentation and binaries. Since the announcement, our Google Group has grown to a 22 members (including a number of MySQL employees and prominent community members), and we've gained a few interesting new UDF libraries:

lib_mysqludf_preg

A library authored by …