Microsoft and Novell have announced a set of deals bunched together to create one of the most significant developments in the Linux versus Microsoft saga: technical collaboration, a so-called ‘intellectual property bridge’ (I-won’t-sue-you, you-won’t-sue me), and a joint support and services deal designed to counter the Oracle-Red Hat announcement of last week.

As this was breaking last night, our Open Source Practice Head Raven Zachary said, “Microsoft’s move to embrace Linux through an alliance with Novell is one of the most significant open source announcements to date. This announcement seems rushed, years in advance of what I expected from Microsoft, and clearly a response to Oracle’s announcement last week.”

First, the technical collaboration addresses three areas of threat by the open source world to Microsoft, to wit, server virtualization, web services management and open document formats. The companies will …

I already knew my way around the open source database scene when I started preliminary research for my diploma thesis last December. However writing this paper has been a great opportunity to dive into this topic really indepth, dispelling some misconceptions of my own along the way. Once I finished my last courses at university in March, I began to focus on this topic. Obviously I was still doing some open source and commercial development on the side during this time. So all in all I probably put in around 6 months of time in this.

On Wednesday I picked up the nicely bound copies of my 173 page diploma thesis. I dropped off at one copy of it at the university yesterday. So today I am releasing the paper to the public. The fancy title is as follows:
Synergies and Opportunities:
Open Source and Commercial Vendors
A study of the …

I’m halfway to restoring all the articles at VBMySQL.com. I’ve been able to clear up some typos and errors along the way while using the experience to come up with ideas for sessions at the next MySQL UC.

I’m thinking of a session to follow up my well-attended session on Managing Hierarchies in MySQL from last year’s conference, adding more breadth and depth to the session by covering multiple approaches to managing hierarchies and extended information on using stored procedures, views and partitioning to manage hierarchies.

What do you think? Did you attend the previous session? Would a three-hour tutorial be useful?

Jimi Hendrix once asked, "Are you experienced?" The new song, however, is "Are you assimilated?"

Assimilated into what? The Borg, of course. :-)

What is The Borg? It's the ever closing world of the large, proprietary ecosystems. Such ecosystems deliver a lot of value - greater integration between components, improved (theoretically) ease of use, etc. Microsoft has been the master of this, and Oracle is mounting the most formidable challenge to Microsoft (perhaps one reason for the Linux announcement, and clearly a reason for its announced …

I’ve been thinking a lot about Core Data recently. It supports SQLite out of the box, and its rather scalable and fast. Main reason being sqlite3 is included on every desktop and server of OS X that has shipped since 10.4 (Tiger).

It got me thinking about using MySQL as a data store. It will involve work, as Core Data itself is not extensible. And if written, will we have to embed MySQL into the application? What kind of problems will this pose? Licensing is the least of my worries, I’m thinking more from an application perspective.

I haven’t played with the Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF) yet, but it allows custom SQL, and is available in WebObjects so its probably time to take a gander. Only real problem is its not in Core Data, thus not available in desktop applications. Then there’s …

Version 1.1.1 of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL, a robust and
intelligent solution for backup and recovery of MySQL databases is available
for download at Zmanda downloads page.

Changes since 1.1 release:
* FHS compliance (plugins are now in /usr/share/mysql-zrm directory)
* Bug fixes

ZRM for MySQL users manual is available in the wiki.

Please use bugzilla to report bugs in the release and product improvements.

Today I fixed a bug in our application that was interesting to figure out. Without a ton of detail, the gist is that if you convert a datetime to unix timestamp in MySQL:

mysql> select UNIX_TIMESTAMP('2006-10-28 04:00:00'); 
+---------------------------------------+
| UNIX_TIMESTAMP('2006-10-28 04:00:00') |
+---------------------------------------+
|                            1162022400 |
+---------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

And then add 24 hours to it:

mysql> select 1162022400 + (60*60*24);
+-------------------------+
| 1162022400 + (60*60*24) |
+-------------------------+
|              1162108800 |
+-------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

And then convert it back to a datetime it magically loses an hour:

mysql> select FROM_UNIXTIME('1162108800');
+-----------------------------+
| FROM_UNIXTIME('1162108800') |
+-----------------------------+
| 2006-10-29 03:00:00 …

All -

I’m pretty excited that 5.1.12 is now out! Thanks to everyone who has been helping us test all the great new features in 5.1 - I hope you’ll download 5.1.12 and keep up the good work. One thing that I especially like about the 5.1.12 beta is that it has the highly requested feature of being able to dynamically turn on/off the general and slow query logs, which makes impromptu tracing of SQL much easier.

Download 5.1.12 and let me know what you think.

Thanks again for supporting MySQL!

When I was upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1 I noticed the internal 'mysql' database had tables of reference data. This allows clients to get help directly from the server instead of browsign the online docs at mysql.com. This is convenient when you are not connected to the internet.....

The MySQL Community team led by Jay Pipes is putting together MySQL Camp, an "un-conference" that will be held November 10-12 in Mountain View, California. This is not a fancy formal gathering, just an opportunity for smart folks from the MySQL community to gather together, share notes, ideas, best practices, do some brainstorming and maybe hack on some code!  There's a range of proposed topics but half the fun will be seeing what comes together on one unstructured weekend.  If you're in the bay area, check it out. This is a low-key, non-corporate event designed for folks who want to participate and not just be observers.

• MySQLCamp.org: Home, …