I wrote a post recently that focused only on things I see as shortcomings or problems with Gentoo GNU/Linux. That was the intent of the article, to explain why I switched to Ubuntu for my personal systems. On the flip side, nothing's perfect, but nothing's perfectly flawed, either. There are still many things I like about Gentoo.

I have been waiting and waiting ever since the announcement that the MySQL database had split into the MySQL Enterprise Server and MySQL Community Server.

Waiting for what?

For my mind to come to some resolution or conclusion about the change and what it means. It has been some time now and it just hasn't happened. I'm not sure what it says about me that I can't come to a conclusion about this, but here's what I've got so far while waiting for more time to pass. Feelings on any of this are subject to change.

Note: I've had a long-time sense that MySQL must be careful in their balance between feeling like a commercial business and feeling like an open source project. I wrote about this almost three years ago at the 2004 MySQL Users Conference. I think the …

I got notified yesterday that my proposal for a talk at php|tek. I'll be presenting a talk entitled "Top 15 Ways to Kill MySQL Performance", which will be a fun-filled look at all those things we, as application and database developers, do to shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to MySQL database performance. Lots of SQL coding techniques, and, as I say in the abstract, you're guaranteed to leave the taslk with at least one gem you can use to point the finger at a colleague! Good times!

TimeSys Board of Directors Appoints Joseph J. Raffa Interim CEO, TimeSys (Press Release)

realMethods Expands Its Open Source Scope, realMethods (Press Release)

DHS gears up for research phase of open source bug hunt, Linux.com, Michael Stutz (Article)

Opinion: Five reasons why you should never use PostgreSQL — ever, SearchOpenSource.com, W. Jason Gilmore (Article)

Editor’s Note: Which Road To Take?, Linux Today, Brian …

A popular myth holds that the MySQL Database Server strips the comments from stored procedures, functions, triggers, views and events. This is not true. Or at least, it is only somewhat true.

On an earlier occasion, I have written about MySQL views and how they lose all their comments and whitespace formatting. The article also describes a workaround for it. (Interestingly, a few of the bugs I ran into at the time are now resolved, which means …

Daniel Nichter has released version 3.0 of mysqlreport, one of my favorite tools for quickly comprehending the overall state of a MySQL server. The new version prints out the most important information about InnoDB.

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When people are comparing databases and trying to select the correct one for their application, it is a very complex and confusing process. There are many factors, price being not the least of these. Some would opt for a closed-source product because of the extra bells and whistles it offers. I have to say that some of these extra features may represent security risks, or simply a database trying to take on functionality better performed at the application layer. There is a certain argument to have all of your business logic embedded in the database as it certainly eases the burden on the application programmers. But it can allow them to become sloppy, or to allow the database to be exposed directly to the users without even an application layer to protect it, counting on the database to protect itself. In some cases this comes at a price, sacrificing speed for security, when some fairly simple application coding could have implemented the same …

mysqlreport v3.0 has been released (v2.8 & v2.9 were skipped) which finally has InnoDB reports for MySQL servers v5.0.2 and up. The documentation has been updated accordingly. The new options that invoke the InnoDB reports are –innodb (or -id), –innodb-only (or -ido), and –dpr (for the extra Data, Pages, Rows report).

Since this is the first release with InnoDB reports, feedback on the InnoDB reports is appreciated. Eventually, I’ll update the mysqlreport guide to explain the InnoDB reports. For now, I think the InnoDB reports are self-evident to those who know a little about how the InnoDB …

I'm flying back from Alfresco's quarterly management meeting, and looking through some of the data shared by the team. We're just one company in a rising tide of open source companies, so I'm not sure how much to infer from our numbers about open source, generally, but I thought I'd share, anyway. Perhaps the data will be useful for you, too, as you plan your own open source business.

A few points:

1. Lead Generation. Alfresco's website (Downloads/product trials) drives 72% of our leads, and documentation drives another 21%. Cold calls from sales people, direct mail, email, Google Adwords, and other sources you might imagine...almost nothing. To be fair, we don't really do direct mail or email campaigns yet, so it's not surprising that these bring in few leads.

   But we found (as SugarCRM and MySQL found before us) that PR, which leads to visits to our website …