Ask a simple question, get a simple, but subtle answer. I asked Savio Rodrigues, who replaced me on the Open Sources blog but originally blogged here, to comment on the state of open source at IBM. He gave me a bit more than that.

You know, IBM, the company that essentially carried open source into the enterprise on its back in 2000 when it pledged $1 billion to fund Linux. Lately, though, IBM's has been less flashy with its commitment to open source though, as Savio points out, no less involved. As Savio reports, however, IBM's commitment to open source is broader than source code. Open source without open standards isn't of much interest to Big Blue.

In this fifth installment of the Open Source @ Series on The Open …

Brian has written a library that implements "XML Row Storage", and has added it to his HTTP Storage Engine.

I've got a couple of hours to add it to my S3 Storage Engine.

I've already stumbled over the fact that my engine as it was won't build against a very recent MySQL 5.1 source tree. Type byte is now uchar, and the call parameters of get_server_by_name have changed.

SHOW CREATE TRIGGER was added two weeks ago into 5.1 branch - it turned out there is no way to do mysqlbackup without this statement when the trigger is defined in a character set that is not UTF-8.

And while we are on triggers, some most painful locking bugs with triggers are being fixed too (in 5.0) - Bug#26141 mixing table types in trigger causes full table lock on innodb table and Bug#24989 'Explicit or implicit commit' error/server crash with concurrent transactions. With these two fixes in, triggers should actually become usable with InnoDB.

Problem #1 - “[notice] child pid 13449 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)”

On a OpenBSD v3.7 i386 system running Apache v1.3.29 (not chrooted) with PHP v5.1.4 I upgraded HTML_BBCodeParser from version 1.1 to version 1.2.2 by running at command line “pear upgrade-all”. After the upgrades were complete the web site would not load a web page anymore. I looked at my HTTPD server logs and noticed I was receiving the following error message in error_log file, “[notice] child pid 13449 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)” whenever there was a HTTP request on port 80 or 443 to the web site. I couldn’t understand what the problem could be but then decided to uninstall HTML_BBCodeParser …

We've recently hired our first CIO at MySQL, and it's interesting to consider how the role of the CIO is different from what it used to be. MySQL has some particular challenges from an information management perspective because we have so many employees working from home around the world. Otherwise, I think the role of CIO at our company is not that different from most other young companies. But what's really changed is the nature of IT in the past six or seven years. Back in 1999 and 2000, a lot of IT effort was spent in scaling up. CEOs... READ MORE

I am moving halfway across the world. Therefore, for the remainder of July and all of August and September HackMySQL.com will not be actively maintained. This means no updates to scripts or articles and very limited response to feedback.

Oracle owns the database world. And this may be precisely its biggest problem.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, customers aren't planning to snap up its newest version of its industry-leading database, 11g. The reason? Oracle is improving its database at a much slower pace, providing fewer reasons to upgrade:

[I]t typically takes at least several months for a company to fully shift to a new version of Oracle's database software -- the larger the company, the longer it takes -- and lately Oracle has made several small, incremental changes in new releases rather than a few large, important ones that would compel a company to switch quickly, customers say....

...highlighting maturation in the database industry. The Independent Oracle Users Group, an independent organization for …

I just downloaded the latest Google Maps for my Treo.

Awesome :)

Why is that? They have added two of the features I have most wanted.
When I go and look for a location, I can select addresses from my
contact database. Looking up friend's addresses on the map is now
just two clicks.

Better? When I find a business via Google Maps I can then select to
have a vCard created for the business (and Google even gives you the
phone number in the vCard). The application also gives me the option
to call the address as well.

So I can now find a business, and add it to my contacts database.

And for the hell of it, I entered "Cuppertino, California" and then
selected "MySQL" as a local business.

What did I get?

Not only the offices address and phone number, but the URL for the
company as well! …

Last time I was in Silicon Valley in April after MySQL Users Conference, this time I’m planning to spend July 30 - August 2nd in Silicon Valley after OSCON visiting friends and customers. If you’re located in Silicon Valley or San Francisco area and interested in some onsite MySQL Consulting I can offer 1 day and half day visits during these days with no added cost (meaning you just pay for consulting time, and Hotel and Travel is on me)

This time could be well spent to have mini-training on MySQL high performance design operations or development practices, to look into your application architecture and check it against growth requirements or simply look into performance challenges you might have.

Just a reminder that a new version of the 5.1 beta has been released, so please download the latest and greatest and keep submitting any bugs that you find. Also please shoot me a mail (rschumacher@mysql.com) and let me know how you’re using 5.1 and what features you find most useful. Thanks!