China is becoming more and more important as a market for software; both proprietary and open source software. Still knowledge as to what is really taking place is quite limited with both language and cultural barriers making it difficult to understand for many westerners at least, to what is the Chinese opportunity for software developers and vendors globally.

Some good coverage in the last year from the blogspace can be found e.g. from especially Stephen Walli , but also from Amy Jiang of Canonical/Ubuntu , Zack Urlocher of MySQL and Matt Asay of Alfresco . However, this is …

You want to run the mysqlnd tests, because you never trust anybody else test results? In particular you are getting sceptical if anybody claims to have reached a certain level of stability? Read on, here’s a step-by-step for faking your own test results.

New tests …

PHP extensions can test their userland (PHP) functionality using so called “phpt Tests”. phpt Tests consist of several parts with their main part being regular PHP code to test PHP. On the website of the PHP Quality Assurance Team you can find a documentation of the phpt Tests syntax on the page Writing Tests, if your are interested in the details. Most extensions contain a tests/ subdirectory in the …

You want to run the mysqlnd tests, because you never trust anybody else test results? In particular you are getting sceptical if anybody claims to have reached a certain level of stability? Read on, here’s a step-by-step for faking your own test results.

New tests …

PHP extensions can test their userland (PHP) functionality using so called “phpt Tests”. phpt Tests consist of several parts with their main part being regular PHP code to test PHP. On the website of the PHP Quality Assurance Team you can find a documentation of the phpt Tests syntax on the page Writing Tests, if your are interested in the details. Most extensions contain a tests/ subdirectory in the …

MySQL AB today announced that BlueLithium, a leading online marketing company, is implementing a business-critical data warehouse application built upon MySQL and the BrightHouse database engine from Infobright Inc. MySQL AB and Infobright, a MySQL Certified Storage Engine partner, are expanding their relationship to jointly offer customers analytic data warehousing solutions.

If you've ever wished you could see MySQL's EXPLAIN output formatted as a tree, now you can. MySQL Visual Explain transforms EXPLAIN output into a hierarchical view of the query plan, which is significantly easier to read and understand.

A blog comment from Ian makes me wonder if I failed to state clearly what mysqlnd is. See below for his comment. Ian, I am thankful for your blog comment and question! Probably you are not the only reader who needs a little more background knowledge about mysqlnd. Please allow me to answer your question in public and in depth. FAQ: What is mysqlnd, do I need it?.

The acronym “mysqlnd” stands for “MySQL native driver for PHP”. This pretty much says nothing to most people, I guess.

• “native”: Is it written in PHP? No, that would be two slow. As you probably know, PHP itself is a program written in C. Therefore native means C and tightly integrated into PHP on the level of C. This is for sure a good thing as the driver can try to squeeze out the optimum of PHP. …

A blog comment from Ian makes me wonder if I failed to state clearly what mysqlnd is. See below for his comment. Ian, I am thankful for your blog comment and question! Probably you are not the only reader who needs a little more background knowledge about mysqlnd. Please allow me to answer your question in public and in depth. FAQ: What is mysqlnd, do I need it?.

The acronym “mysqlnd” stands for “MySQL native driver for PHP”. This pretty much says nothing to most people, I guess.

• “native”: Is it written in PHP? No, that would be two slow. As you probably know, PHP itself is a program written in C. Therefore native means C and tightly integrated into PHP on the level of C. This is for sure a good thing as the driver can try to squeeze out the optimum of PHP. …

If you’ve ever wished you could see MySQL’s EXPLAIN output formatted as a tree, now you can. MySQL Visual Explain transforms EXPLAIN output into a hierarchical view of the query plan, which is significantly easier to read and understand. What it does MySQL Visual Explain is a command-line tool, not a Graphical User Interface (GUI). You can use it two ways: Give it a query and some connection options, and it will connect and EXPLAIN the query, then show you the result as a tree.

In his OSCON keynote last Thursday (26 July 2007), Bill Hilf of Microsoft described his perspective of the “two steps forward, one step backward” relationship between Microsoft and the world of Open Source. Amongst the steps forward, I count the establishment of a web site microsoft.com/opensource, releasing some Microsoft software under an OSI compliant license, and — specifically to MySQL — the mentioning of the MySQL Connector for Visual Studio in his OSCON presentation.

Microsoft seems to be acknowledging that there is a …

After taking a well earned break from studying, I dusted off my copy of the MySQL Certification Guide and lost my head again for a good 4 days or so.

My goal this time was to achieve Certified MySQL 5.0 Developer through upgrading my Core certification - sounds easy right?.

That’s what I though. I totally underestimated this exam, thinking it was just an upgrade and that the questions would be straightforward, after all there are only 60 questions in this exam compared to the 70 per exam for DBA!.

Having spent less time this year writing code, …