Charlie Babcock has a fantastic article on the rising tide of open source in the latest edition of InformationWeek. As I've written recently, the bar is getting lower to launch a successful open source business. That said, there are tens of thousands of lame open source projects, for every good one (the same is true of proprietary software, btw). As Babcock writes:

There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions--most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out. …

innotop 1.3.5 is the latest release of the increasingly popular MySQL and InnoDB monitor. I recommend everyone upgrade to this release. Aside from incomplete documentation, it's close to a stable 1.4 release (I'm counting on you to find the bugs!). There are many significant new features since version 1.3, which make it more powerful and easier to use.

Note: Part I is located at the page that describes part one

Disclaimer
Just a minor clarification to anyone that was confused: I am currently experiencing Sphinx for the first time. Everything I’m writing about is new to me as well, for the most part. So far, I’m drooling over some of it’s capabilities; I may come back in a month and rip it a new ass hole.

Back to Configuration… (not really, this is the bitching section)

In preparation for my previous post about Sphinx, I had originally played with a number of configuration options, and even encountered a couple of issues that caused my confused butt to have to debug a number of things, and even recompile --with-debug and gdb the thing …

innotop 1.3.5 is the latest release of the increasingly popular MySQL and InnoDB monitor. I recommend everyone upgrade to this release. Aside from incomplete documentation, it’s close to a stable 1.4 release (I’m counting on you to find the bugs!). There are many significant new features since version 1.3, which make it more powerful and easier to use. Here’s what’s new: Support for colorizing rows. Default color rules are included for Q, T and M modes; it’s easy to write your own.

Over-the-Top Tales from the Trenches. Motto: Bringing order to the chaos of every day DBA life. Dear Diary, Are we there yet? How much farther? Ever heard this during a recovery of a downed database? The poor thing has either a minor scratch, requires immediate attention, or is dead on arrival (DOA). You could cut the tension in the air with [...]

MySQL Connector/Net 1.0.9 has been released. MySQL Connector/Net is an all-managed ADO.Net provider for MySQL. This release is suitable for use in production environments and with any version of MySQL.

It is now available in source and binary form from the Connector/Net download pages at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/1.0.html and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

This release includes many bug fixes along with the following enhancements/changes:

* Implemented a stored procedure cache. By default, the connector caches the metadata for the last 25 procedures that are seen. You can change the number of procedures that are cached by using the 'procedure …

Today we have released MySQL Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.1.2 -- a downloadable plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 that allows Windows developers to quickly build MySQL data-driven applications with Visual Studio. With this plug-in, developers will be able to create, modify and manage MySQL database objects with an easy-to-use interface from within the Visual Studio IDE. This product is delivered as a package compatible with Visual Studio 2005.

This release is identical to 1.1.0 in functionality. We identified and corrected some problems with the installers for 1.1.0 and the unreleased 1.1.1.

The 1.1 series plugin adds support for using the DataSource wizard and the DataSet designer in Visual Studio 2005. The Data Source wizard can be found by choosing Data|Add Data Source from the Visual Studio menu. It provides a way to connect the generic data-handling capabilities of Visual Studio to our provider. Once a data source is …

Ok, I thought this Windows Vista Upgrade Decision Flowchart was kind of funny.  (Click on the link below and then open up the PDF.) The weird thing is everyone's been talking about LongHorn Vista for so friggin' long, I didn't even realize it was launching this week.  It was five years in the making, so I'm sure it's an improvement over XP, but does it really matter any more? For a slightly more serious perspective, check out John Stewart's interview with …

I always enjoy trying to do my work creating web applications using the fewest number of database queries possible. It's kind of a pride thing, I guess. That and I suppose it makes to improve an app's performance and reduce the load on a server. If you're into that kind of thing. ;)A technique I use subtitutes the temptation of using queries whose results call queries and instead uses only two. ...

Welcome to the thirtieth edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. We start with an item on O’Reilly Radar by Tim O’Reilly: Data is the Intel Inside. Tim shows some evidence in favour of the the notion that, in the post-Web-2.0 world (”Web 2.0″ being a coinage of his own), where data and [...]