Today I booked (well, I did that a couple of days ago) and paid for my flight ticket to the 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo. As always, its the last day for staff to get their stuff together, so I did :-)

Now, all you folk out there, might find that if you register by March 14 (I believe thats in the US timezone), you’ll save $200, so thats a total cost of only $1,295! Its at the Santa Clara Convention Center, so stay at the Hyatt if you’re wanting to hang out with MySQL’ers even after hours. Alternatively, if you’re looking for other (cheaper?) accomodation, there’s the Hilton across the road.

I’d recommend the tutorial day, especially if you’re interested in Cluster, as my friend and colleague Stewart Smith is doing the …

…whoever wrote this patch:

Server version: 5.0.33-log flupps build (probably not stable…)

Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the buffer.

mysql> use world;
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Database changed
mysql> SELECT * FROM country, city, city c, city c2, city c3;
^CQuery aborted by Ctrl+C
ERROR 1317 (70100): Query execution was interrupted
mysql>

It doesn’t abort the client to Control-C now, just the query…
Swwwweeeeeeetttttt…….

The other day I managed to send off what’s nearly the final patches for adding proper timeout support to the MySQL Cluster management API. Jonas has had a bit of a look, found one thing I’ve missed, but it’ll probably get in somewhere soon (probably the carrier grade edition first, then others… 5.1 makes sense IMHO if only for the amount of management server testing that my patches add).

Unfortunately in what we laughingly call the past the management server - for whatever hysterical raisins - never really received much direct testing. Sure, if the data nodes couldn’t get configuration, autotest couldn’t control the daemons or something then things were obviously broken. But, say, a subtle (or not so much) change in API or behaviour would certainly not be picked up.

Although the real “feature of the year” (not my words) is fault injection for the management server that we can use in testing. The MySQL Cluster …

People across North-America are scrambling to update their servers, in order to deal with the upcoming timezone changes.

I'll tell you a little secret that has served me well... ever since the C libraries were a pest in the mid eighties (the ones on DOS defaulted to GMT-5, US EST, or something in that realm), and since with layers of libraries you easily risk missing a timezone conversion, or get double/triple conversions, I decided to never use timezones on servers again.

In the old DOS days, the library issues were resolved by making an app do setenv("TZ=GMT0"); tzset(); on startup. No more conversion problems, regardless of the system time.

But in essense I do the same on Internet servers that I manage. They all simply run in GMT and therefore never need to change timezones - and they're immune to dst funnies invented by George W Bush, too ;-)

On display, an application simply converts …

Sourcefire prices IPO…OpenLogic adds support for Solaris…Krugle offers Eclipse code search plugin…and more…

Sourcefire, Inc. Prices Initial Public Offering of Common Stock, Sourcefire (Press Release)

OpenLogic Adds Open Source Packages on Sun Solaris To Certified Library, OpenLogic (Press Release)

New Eclipse Plug-in From Krugle Offers Code Search For Enterprise Developers, Krugle (Press Release)

Oregon State University Joins Eclipse Foundation, Announces Global Open Source Health Project, Oregon State University (Press Release)

…

I spotted Edin's blog post about PHP 4.4.6 now being linked against MySQL 5.0.36 on Windows and decided to see what is new in that release in comparison to the 5.0.33 I am currently running.

A quick visit to the MySQL's downloads page revealed a distinct absence of said release however. There are however release notes about MySQL 5.0.37, which lists some compelling fixes. Unfortunately, this release is nowhere to be found as well, even though the release notes claim it was released on 27 February 2007.

A simple question comes to mind, WTF?

I'm continuing to add new tools to the MySQL Toolkit. MySQL Deadlock Logger is for extracting and storing information about the latest recorded InnoDB deadlock. It's not only easy to view the information from the command line, it's dead simple to store it back into a MySQL table for analysis. I think most users will find it handy to create a cron job to record the deadlocks automatically for later analysis.

A week or so ago, I posted a journal entry about MySQL replication titled "Changing hats". The fruit of the effort in setting up this replication system can be seen at http://www.grazr.com. This is a really cool system we built at Grazr provides users free upload and hosting of their own Feeds (RDF, RSS, OPML, ATOM), displaying those feeds into the nifty Grazr widget. I was never a feed junky, but am becoming one! The idea (as I see it), in this information-overflow world, is to organise or distill your information sources. At least one part of my life could certainly use that. Still much more to learn, and Grazr.com also includes a great tutorial about feeds, OPML, and how to use Grazr.

This was a great experience, and I learned more in depth about so many things that I thought I knew …

TDWI Conference, Las Vegas - Infobright, supplier of a market leading software-only data warehousing appliance, today announced that True North Corporation has selected the Infobright BrightHouse data warehouse platform.

And so last night Arsenal's Champions League season ended in a brilliant match which ended the completely wrong way. Arsenal's problem is clear: it's incredibly slick passing and footwork results in too few goals. (Stay with me here - this really is an open source post.)

But that doesn't really tell the story. The real story behind Arsenal's problems sounds eerily similar to Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma. And, hence, Arsenal's problem is much like the software industry's problem.

Arsenal has dominated (off and on) English football for nearly 100 years. In 2004-05, the team went 49 games without being beaten. At the heart of its recent success is Thierry Henry, the world's best forward. In years past, Henry put in more goals than anyone else in the league, in striking and beautiful fashion.

This year? Not even a …