Jon Stokes writes about this on Arstechnica, looking at a forthcoming Virginia Law Review paper entitled "The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design," in which two law professors investigate how the fashion industry manages to thrive despite rampant copying of clothing designs.

While it's not simply applicable to other areas (such as software), quite a few interesting observations are made - the most interesting (to me) is that making a generalistic presumption about needing very strong IP protection in order to drive innovation is just plain wrong, as the fashion industry proves. It may apply to other areas, but it's clearly not a universal rule.

I actually think that fashion and software have a lot in common, particularly in terms of the …

Continuent Sequoia, an open source database clustering solution, is part of a suite of Continuent.org open source projects that deliver high availability for virtually any database environment, including MySQL and its all engines (MyISAM, InnoBD, SolidDB, etc.).

So I've expanded the scope of the NDB/Python wrappers I was working on. Now I've got Python, Perl and C# wrappers working, at least for basic functionality. I've setup a trac instance and put a roadmap and all of that type of stuff up. If you are interested in hacking, let me know and we can talk about subversion access and all that.

For the moment, I've turned off code downloading. I'll post again when I've enabled it again.

One of the things about working for an Open Source company, is that I
feel the "need to be careful" about what post if the post involves a
competitor (or even a competing project). The problem of course is
that I deal with many open source communities that are not related to
MySQL at all (or my work on MySQL), so I do notice trends that have
nothing to do with databases.

I need a secret identity to post comments about MySQL competitors :)

Ah, screw it!

Last week I went to go buy a new 1u for project from ABMX (http://www.abmx.com/). ABMX is my current favorite white box vendor. I've
never had an issue with their computers and they are priced right.

What do I notice in the checkout box?

The linux that comes default is "Oracle Enterprise Linux 4.4".

My Link: …

A new poll we’re running on the MySQL web site shows that a lot of folks still aren’t familiar with the strict mode/sql mode setting that was introduced with MySQL 5.0. The sql_mode parameter allows you to have MySQL better enforce data integrity in terms of what data is accepted/rejected by the server. Not having this capability produced a number of gotchas in previous MySQL versions, but in 5.0, these all go away.

The sql_mode config parameter is very flexible in terms of how strong/lax you want to be with respect to having MySQL enforce data integrity. For more information on all the options available to you with the sql_mode parm, see the MySQL Manual. And for a quick primer on sql_mode and how to use it, you can …

A kind soul has contributed a Debian/Ubuntu package for the innotop MySQL and InnoDB monitor. Thanks Sebastien Estienne!

In the past life was easy in MySQL. Both CHAR and VARCHAR types meant the same, only being difference in the sense of fixed or dynamic row length used. Trailing spaces were removed in both cases.

With MySQL 5.0 however things changed so now VARCHAR keeps trailing spaces while CHAR columns do not any more. Well in reality CHAR columns are padded to full length with spaces but it is invisible as those trailing spaces are removed upon retrieval. This is something you need to watch both upgrading to MySQL 5.0 as well as designing your applications - you should keep into account if you mind trailing spaces stored choosing VARCHAR vs CHAR in addition to fixed length vs dynamic level rows and space spent for column size counter.

There is more fun stuff with trailing spaces. When comparison is done trailing spaces are always removed, even if VARCHAR column is used which is pretty counterintuitive. So “a “=”a”=”a ” for all …

MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos received a Nokia Foundation Award for his leadership in advancing open source technology.  The Nokia Foundation was formed in 1995 in Finland to support the scientific development of information and telecommunications technologies. Previous recipients of the annual award include Linus Torvalds, and professor Moncef Gabbouj from the Tampere Uninversity of Technology in Finland.

The telecommunications industry in general and Nokia in particular, have been huge beneficiaries of open source technology, with extensive use of Linux and the MySQL to power …

I started this post a month ago, but after Kaj’s discussion on the same topic at the MySQL Camp I figured it was time to post.

I had dinner with a friend recently (a very smart friend), and our conversation lead him to ask “What’s different with MySQL?”. One of the things I tried to describe was the “Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture” (PSE) potential for the future that I expect will set MySQL apart from all other Open Source and even commercial databases.

Here are some details of the example I tried to provide, given somebody who understands enough of the general principles of RDBMS’s.

Consider the ability that information (intelligent data) is available within a Relational Database via the appropriate tools and language (e.g. SQL) but it is not physically constrained to Tables, Columns …

The internet is a great thing. You can find almost anything and share your ideas with anybody that is willing to listen. Unfortunately, that means that anybody with an pugnacious personality and a keyboard also has a voice.

A couple weeks ago, somebody asked me where I deploy MySQL. I created this post about where I think MySQL's sweet spots are in my organization.

I'm no MySQL expert, I'll admit it. In fact, right at the top of the post I indicate as such:
In my opinion, I'd use MySQL for anything but the most mission critical applications. I'm not saying MySQL can't handle the most mission critical applications, but I'm not comfortable betting my business on MySQL at this point. Sheeri Kritzer decides to put her own disparaging slant on my post and writes …