Years ago, I remember pontificating that open source would never touch the application market. Narrowly viewing open source through the prism of the day, I said things like this (to John Koenig at IT Managers Journal):

To date, enterprise-focused open source has been best in those areas of the software stack that have a broad (approaching universal) user population. Things like operating systems and browsers. When you have a population with the aptitude and interest in improving something (like the Linux kernel), there's simply no better way to develop it -- let users develop to what they want.

Open source works less well in applications that have a smaller niche of users. It's not that open source development communities can't do applications because we find FireFox, OpenOffice, and others, or that they can't do vertical market applications, because we …

?What ever advice you got, keep it to yourself, your not the target market.”

Red Hat & One Laptop Per Child UI Designer to bunch of suits - MySQL Conference 2007

CollabNet acquires SourceForge Enterprise Edition from VA Software. Red Hat acquires MetaMatrix for JBoss offering. MontaVista acquires MontaVista Ltd and Liberte. (and more)

Note: Due to a cross-country conference trip and limited Internet access, there was no 451 CAOS Links on Monday 04/23/07.

CollabNet and VA Software Sign Asset Purchase Agreement for Acquisition of SourceForge Enterprise Edition Business by CollabNet, CollabNet (Press Release)

Red Hat Defines Next Significant Open Source Migration Opportunity, Red Hat (Press Release)

MontaVista Acquires Two Companies to Increase Professional Services Capacity and to Broaden European Market Coverage, MontaVista …

I spoke to Matt and Barry today, and it was great to see them at the DotOrg Pavilion at the MySQL Expo, since the last time we caught up was at WordCamp 2006. Since WordCamp, Wordpress.com is now spanning something like 900,000+ registered users! That number used to be over 300,000+, just a few months ago, so it looks like they’re really popular.

While Barry entertained a visitor, Matt and I got to talking about growing companies. He’s really happy with the size of Automattic, and is going to try for as long as possible to keep the company size, under fifty. He’s also found it interesting that some people are running WordPress 1.2 (ick! security holes galore), and while I worried that the database itself might not be migrate-able, he mentions that going …

Today’s keynote, by MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, was titled The Participatory & Disruptive Spirit of the Dolphin. Here are some random notes I took.

Tired                Wired

Packaged Apps        On-Demand

Closed Source        Open Source (jboss, php, mysql, apache, linux)

Complex Hardware     Commodity Hardware

Most innovative companies, are clearly wired, and are enjoying the technology market shifts. Small players can now swim around the big players.

“Open Source disrupts inefficient models and produces new wealth.”

Star Wreck - Finnish dry humor, production by amateurs, and exteremely popular. Catch it on YouTube?

“We hope you’ll travel to MECA” - MySQL Enterprise Connection Alliance. Probably not the most sensible comment, but it does humor in it ;-)

Serve the underserved - offer flying to those that would otherwise …

Using MEMORY tables in MySQL is very useful; they are stored in memory and they are usually not so big in order to avoid a huge utilization of RAM. They are very fast.

MEMORY tables are often used to store session user data, chat messages and to store small frames of data from a bigger table in order to achieve great performance.

But, if you use them in a replication environment, you can have some problem due to their "volatility"; MEMORY table rows are lost when the server shuts down.

If you restart a slave host for some reason, you will have empty MEMORY tables on it, while the master host will have the correct ones.

How to populate automatically MEMORY tables at slave start up copying data from master host?

We could use something like LOAD TABLE table_name FROM MASTER, but it's deprecated, so we will use something else.

I have developed a stored procedure you have to create on the …

MySQL AB and IBM today announced a joint technology and reseller agreement to bring support for the MySQL open source database to the IBM System i business computing platform.

The two companies will work together to offer the MySQL Server for i5/OS, the flagship operating system for System i, and plan to deliver DB2 for i5/OS as a certified MySQL storage engine on the System i platform. This will allow System i customers to implement online and transactional MySQL applications while storing all data in a single, easy-to-manage DB2 database.

In my second day at the MySQL Conference and Expo 2007, I attended keynotes, several sessions, and three BoF (Birds of a Feather) sessions. This article is about these sessions. Again, I’ll focus on the Big Ideas and let you read other people’s blog posts for the small details. Keynotes There were three keynotes this morning. Two I won’t comment on, but I want to mention the third because it was mostly about the One Laptop Per Child project.

Today I missed a bunch of good talks that I was hoping to attend, because I was figuring out a problem at the Guru Bar. Offending criminal: MySQL Connector/ODBC 3.51. Offending OS: Mac OS X/PowerPC.

OS X comes with an ODBC Administrator. Once you unpack the MySQL package, and the .pkg installs itself, you’ll find that all your files are installed in /usr/lib. You need to fire up ODBC Administrator, click on Drivers, and Add the driver. Give it an appropriate Description (MySQL), provide the location of the driver file (/usr/lib/libmyodbc3.dylib), and define it as available within the System (this enables you to enable at the System DSN as well as the User DSN, in the next step).

Later, etiher add as …