I mentioned earlier that I’d blog about progress on the book as we go. It’s not only progress on the book itself – I want to write about the process of writing, because I think it’s very interesting and relevant to software engineering. I’m finding a lot of the work in writing a book comes from some of the same things that make software hard: coordinating work, deciding what should go where, and so on.

UPDATE: for all you people that missed the news and come here directly, we have an RC1 now too.

Dear Kettle fans,

After a long period of bug-squashing and other frantic coding activities, we are happy to give you Kettle’s second milestone of version 3.0.0. (77MB zip file)

What has changed since M1?

• New icons!! This is the first release to include a new set of icons and as such a fresh new look.
• A new Mondrian Input step to read from Pentaho Analyses using MDX.
• A new Regular Expression evaluation step
• Access Input (don’t ask!)
• Fixed / improved repository support
• Improved database dialect handling (SQL Server .. problem and forcing identifiers to lower/uppercase)
…

NetApp is suing Sun Microsystems over the ZFS file system technology (press release). It’s a software patent case, headed for East Texas. The problem? Sun released ZFS as open source, complicating the situation.

451 Storage Analyst Henry Baltazar and I spoke with Dave Hitz, founder and EVP of Network Appliance, briefly by phone today about the lawsuit and the implications for the open source community. Hitz is the named inventor on five of the Network Appliance patents at issue. He has posted an entry about the lawsuit on his blog - NetApp Sues Sun for ZFS Patent Infringement. Take a look. Hitz told me that this case is about NetApp and Sun, not the open source community that has …

MySQL follows ANSI SQL standard quite close. But there are a few points where it differs. To make MySQL follow the ANSI standard more closely you can use the SQL_MODE system system variable.

If you set the SQL mode to ANSI, MySQL will interpret you SQL commands differently. Some of your SELECT statements might work differently or not at all. But which ones? Let's see if you know....

Suppose you change your sql mode setting from none to ANSI. Which of the following statements will be affected:

a) SELECT concat(table_name,' ',column_name) FROM information_schema.COLUMNS
b) SELECT TABLE_NAME||' '||COLUMN_NAME FROM information_schema.COLUMNS
c) SELECT count (*) FROM information_schema.COLUMNS
d) SELECT "TABLE_NAME" FROM information_schema.COLUMNS
e) SELECT `TABLE_NAME` FROM information_schema.COLUMNS

This is the query that just got me to thinking that I should blog about mySQL hints, tips, and ramblings. So... thinking turned into action and now I have a blog! The next step is to be able to keep it going so that it becomes useful to mySQL database administrators that are concerned about performance of mySQL and also need make sure that queries are written well.

Now... onward and forward...

By Tim O'Reilly

Miguel de Icaza writes:

Today we are formalizing a collaboration between Microsoft and Novell with the explicit purpose of bringing Silverlight to Linux and do this in a fully supported way. The highlights of this collaboration include: ... Microsoft will give Novell access to the test suites for Silverlight to ensure that we have a compatible specification. The same test suite that Microsoft uses for Silverlight. Microsoft will give us access to the Silverlight specifications: details that might be necessary to implement 1.0, beyond what is currently published on the web; and specifications on the 1.1 version of Silverlight as it is updated. Microsoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to users of Moonlight from their web site. The codecs will be binary codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a …

A short note to let everyone know that I’ll be heading to Dubai later today to participate in Pythian’s exhibit in the Business Solutions Hall. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, GITEX is like COMDEX for the Middle-East - it’s literally the third largest tradeshow in the world where COMDEX is #1 - [...]

I've been very busy since OSCON, so my blog pipeline is full. Hopefully I can properly catch up on some topics I've been meaning to discuss in the next few weeks. If you've been busy like me, you might be wondering how to catch up and keep up with the things that are most important to you. I've found that having my own planet (blog aggregator) has helped tremendously. If your tastes are similar (PHP, web application security, etc.), you might like mine, cleverly (yeah, right) dubbed Planet Chris. Other planets you might find interesting are Planet PHP, Planet Web Security, and Planet MySQL, although I highly recommend creating your own. I haven't …

MySQL Has API to run Multiple Queries at once. This feature was designed mainly with saving network round trip in mind and got a little traction due to associated security risks and not significant gains in most cases.

What would make MySQL Multiple Queries API more usable ?

Allow to run queries in parallel - The great benefit of knowning all queries at once is of course you can run them in parallel. Asynchrnous submission API would be even better but even multi query working this way would be much better. I know there is a work going on on breaking connection=thread=transaction mapping which may allow having multiple working threads for same transaction within same connection which could possibly allow to implement it.

Optimize query set The other thing you can do when you …

MuleSource launches MuleForge. Talend integrates with SugarCRM. Microsoft issues press release on Open XML standards vote. (and more)

MuleSource Launches MuleForge.org to Accelerate Universal Integration of Data and Services, MuleSource (Press Release)

Talend Announces Data Integration for SugarCRM, Talend (Press Release)

Strong Global Support for Open XML as It Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process, Microsoft (Press Release)

Virtual Iron Integrates SLES 10 Kernel and Drivers in Latest Release, …