2007 is already looking like a great conference year. In the upcoming year, I've decided to diversify the conferences I attend in order to meet new people, address new communities and in general increase PHP's exposure in new places.

As always, the period before and after the holiday season is quiet, but towards the end of February things pick up rapidly. Here's what I've already got on my schedule:

AjaxWorld Conference & Expo - …

More Customer Momentum Around the Microsoft-Novell Agreement, Novell / Microsoft (Press Release)

JasperSoft announces reaches 5,000 customers as momentum for Open Source Business Intelligence Accelerates, JasperSoft (Press Release)

OpenMFG Follows ERP Upgrade with Open Source Report Writer, OpenMFG (Press Release)

ZRM for MySQL is Now Available for Ubuntu, Zmanda (Press Release)

Trolltech releases Qtopia 4.2.0, Trolltech (Press …

New MySQL Administrator and Migration Toolkit released - Find a bug and win an iPod!

I just received great news today. Eben Moglen has agreed to keynote the conference. He joins Matthew Szulik (CEO, Red Hat), Marc West (CIO, H&R Block), Marten Mickos (CEO, MySQL), and one other IT executive (that I can't name just yet) as our distinguished keynotes for the conference. If you haven't heard Eben speak, you're in for a treat. He is masterful, and will seriously challenge a lot of conventional thinking about what "open source" means, and how freedom contributes to capital.

This complements a speaking faculty that also includes senior IT executives from Activision, AIG, Bank of America, Davis Polk Wardwell LLP, US Department of Defense, E*Trade, H&R Block, and others, as well as senior executives from leading industry players like MySQL, Alfresco, SugarCRM, Oracle, Microsoft, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray & Cary, Intel, Olliance Group, Red Hat, Matrix Partners, Mayfield Fund, and a range of others.

This is, hands down, …

Now that the MySQL code base has been forked into Enterprise and Community editions, and things have had time to sort themselves out somewhat, it looks to be pretty much business as usual. The community is as lively as ever in the forums, code fixes are still being pushed to the community tree, etc. There are a few complainers but it seems that you can never please everyone and someone will always find something to beef about. I have been watching the BitKeeper sources, pulling and building nearly every day. Version 5.0 jumps two or sometimes three revisions at a time, I have the strong impression that the skipped numbers have to do with the Enterprise edition. I have not seen any Enterprise source, and I am curious as to when and where this will be available. I also see a lot of activity in 5.1 and some work on 4.1.

Those who need frequent and timely bug fixes basically have two options: subscribe to the Enterprise edition or learn to …

Time magazine has selected You as the person of the year. Not me, you!  You as in YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, SecondLife, FaceBook, HotOrNot, Blogs, Mashups and everything else that symbolizes the democratization of a participative internet culture.  Congratulations to Time for recognizing how the internet and Web 2.0 are changing the world. More importantly, congratulations also to open source developers from MySQL and other projects around the world for enabling the infrastructure that makes this new generation of applications.  Every one of these applications mentioned in Time is powered by MySQL! 

I think we are seeing the very beginning of how Web 2.0 shapes everyone's …

I sometimes see advice to do SQL date operations with the + and - operators on platforms where they are overloaded for date types. I try to avoid that, because it can give unexpected results. I prefer to explicitly use the built-in date/time functions. I'll show you an example where the operators cause problems, but the functions do the right thing.

I can run Oracle Forms on Mozilla Firefox.1- Install JInitiator.2- C:\Program Files\Oracle\JInitiator 1.1.8.19\bin\NPJinitXXXX.dll --XXXX = Version.3- Paste it under this directory of Firefox(C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins).4- Restart Firefox.

This topic may look boring and obvious but it is extremely important for MySQL Performance Optimization. In fact I probably have to touch it in every second MySQL Consulting work or even more frequently.

IO Bound workload is quite different from CPU bound one, which happens when your working set (normally only fraction of your database) fits in memory. What is fast when data is in memory can be extremely slow if it does not. For example if you have the query which analyzes 10000 rows it often would take fraction of the second with fully in memory workload, however if you would need to go to the disk, lets say even only in 10% of the cases and so perform 1000 possibly random reads you will have query taking at least 5-10 second, or more under the load which is already way more than you should target for web applications.

So designing your application …

When I transferred the content of mysqldevelopment.com over to the MySQL Forge site I always intended to continue updating this blog. Unfortunately due to work commitments I simply haven't had the time and because I haven't been working with MySQL so much I also haven't had the quality of content I once had.

Rather unsurprisingly then I haven't been receiving much in the way of email to my email address andrew_gilfrin@mysqldevelopment.com. I have however been getting plenty of spam so I have decided to drop that email address, therefore if you wish to contact me you can do so at my hotmail address (andrew_gilfrin at homtail.com).