It's no secret to anyone that Microsoft caters to developers while Apple is faithful to end-users.  I happen to like Apple's approach since, as a developer, I actually do qualify as a user.  Microsoft should really be concerned since I don't think I would find too many people that would disagree when I say that if the market shares were even, Apple would seriously be in the driver seat.  I use Windows because that's where my money is made and where most of the applications I use exist.  Here is just one example where Microsoft unnecessarily makes things complicated.  Consider this screenshot of my installed apps (I'm using Vista x64).

Now, why do I have separate items listed for SQL Server VSS write, and setup support files, and native …

When you ask someone how to optimize SQL queries you will always get the answer

• enable the slow query log
• set the long-query-time to 1-2 seconds
• enable the logging of query which aren't using an index
• run EXPLAIN on the queries that are shown and optimize them with proper indexes

But how to understand what the EXPLAIN is telling you ?

I picked a query from the ORDER BY RAND article as they became interesting enough to show the different aspects of of a query. They contain:

• Sub-Queries
• Unions
• Special cases
• JOINs
• ORDER BY + LIMIT

If you want to understand how this query was developed, check the original article …

** This is an editied “re-post” of an item i wrote about a year ago. **

MySQL V5.0 has been out for a while; the current production community version is 5.0.27.

With version 5, MySQL has addressed most of the major objections people have that MySQL is not a “real” database. With support for triggers, stored procedures, views and XA transactions, I think MySQL has a feature set that will enable people to easily migrate to MySQL. At this point in time, InnoDB is the only storage engine choice for applications that require transactions, and this is still a reasonable choice in most cases.

The only open question for MySQL A.B. is resolution of the problems created by Oracle’s acquisition of Innobase Oy, the developers of the InnoDB storage engine. I previously wrote a post about the Oracle Innobase issues, the summary is that Oracle’s acquisition of Innobase Oy is a problem not because of the storage engine, but …

ZCS 4.5 helps make admins' jobs easier -- a lot easier in some cases. This post discusses advanced search in the admin console, backup and restore in the admin console, backup performance improvements, and good policies for creating a recoverable system.

Advanced Search for Users, Domains, Servers
We've added an advanced search capability to the admin console. It includes a search builder similar to what has been available in the end user client. We had heard from many customers that they wanted to create complex searches, such as "show me all domains with xyz in them" or "show me all users on server 3" or "show me all users with last name xyz on server 5". You can construct all these searches and quite a few more now, and since the search uses LDAP indexes it's fast. This feature is AJAX helping admins.

Backup and Restore in the Admin Console
For the ZCS 4.5 Network Edition …

Wind River acquires Linux technology from FSMLabs…Novell releases an update to the open source Mono .NET framework…Opengear to support open source Nagios monitoring technology in its network appliances…and more…

Wind River Acquires Hard Real-Time Linux Technology from FSMLabs, Wind River Systems (Press Release)

Major Mono Milestone Significantly Eases Cross-platform Development, Novell (Press Release)

Embedded Nagios Appliances Provide Remote Monitoring and Remote Management, Opengear (Press Release)

Krugle Offers Code Search for the Microsoft Community, Krugle (Press Release)

So, OSDC 2007 (Open Source Developers Conference), held in Melbourne in previous years, will visit glorious sunny Brisbane this year (end November, early December).

My thanks to Anthony Towns, Andrae Muys and James Iseppi for helping me with the legwork and homework to put together our submission, and to the OSDC committee for giving us this opportunity - it'll be good.
More news (including the exact dates and venue) soon, Andrae is already preparing the Call for Papers.

If you are interested in helping and haven't written to me before, now is a good time.
Likewise, if you would like to sponsor this event, getting in early could get you an honourable mention even as early as the call for papers... that would get you nearly 10 months worth of exposure and good karma!
We actually received quite a few expressions of interest for sponsoring already; we'll be attaching sponsorships to specific …

Pentaho, one of our partners in open source Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence will be presenting several sessions at the upcoming MySQL Conference April 23-26 in Santa Clara.  Conference Early Registration ends March 14, so why wait?

Pentaho has also announced the General Availability of Pentaho Data Integration version 2.4 with open source ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) capabilities.

• Pentaho: …

We were having issues with mysql threads where they would be in sleep mode and wouldn’t die off for long time. At the same time we started having issues with our servers where the load will spike and eventually server will come to halt unless we killed all the apache processes and restarted apache [...]

MySQL AB today announced the formation of a new Telecom sales and business unit to meet the growing demand for its high-availability real-time database solutions in the converging telecom industry. The company also announced the availability of a new version of its MySQL Cluster product, especially designed and certified for use in carrier grade telecom environments, such as such as network subscriber databases (HLR, HSS) and Service Delivery Platforms (SDP).

About half a year have passed since me and Vadim have left MySQL to do MySQL Consulting on our own. Bunch of people have been wondering about our experiences so I thought it would be worth to share it here.

Feels Good. I always liked to be my own boss and funny enough I always was very independent in my professional life. In SpyLOG I was second person in the company and completely managed technical department, later in MySQL I still kept a lot of independence with my boss Tom Basil supporting my creativity rather than forcing me to do stuff. This started to gradually change in Corporate MySQL thought. Now I'm finally my own boss without limits. I can do what makes sense for me both in technical and business areas. It feels great.

Feels Scary Sometimes it felt a bit …