Tim has written another insightful piece on where technology is going, based on the technology books people are buying.

With this in mind, take a look at the tree map for programming languages. (Keep in mind, as Tim notes, that "the size of a square indicates the relative size of the category, and its color indicates the rate of change. A category that is bright green is up significantly. One that is bright red is heading strongly in the other direction.")

What are the takeaways?

• Ruby has continued to grow apace, although its 255% growth rate is off last quarter's torrid 687% increase! Interestingly, PHP also picked up some steam, up 11% vs. last quarter's 6% YoY increase. Python's 27% YoY gain, up from last quarter's 6% gain, shows even more strength. In short, while Ruby has become the …

Released a new version of the procedure converter from SQL Server to MySQL. The changes are driven by user requests.

I have added support for temporary table creation: in SQL server you create a temporary table by adding INTO #temptable to your select. This is converted to MySQL CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE and the # is dropped.

Also some minor changes, like support for very large SQL statements, better pretty-printing and improved support for CASE statements.

By Tim O'Reilly

Last week, I talked about the overall state of the computer book market. But most of our readers don't care about the publishing business. They care about the technologies we cover. Here's where we get to the meat: category visualizations and trends showing which technologies are winning and which are losing in the book market. Here's a treemap view of the quarter on quarter differences between Q3 of 2006 and the same period last year:

As I've previously described in Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator, in a Treemap visualization, the size of a square indicates the relative size of the category, and its color indicates the rate of …

OK, it took a while, but it has been worth the wait. At last I can now guarantee that when you download the PBXT source code, it will compile! But seriously, with the released of MySQL 5.1.12 Beta we now have an excellent platform for testing the pluggable storage engine API.

These are interesting times because we are seeing the future of storage engines in MySQL. The PBXT 0.9.73 release demonstrates the ease with which externally built storage engines can be combined with MySQL in the future. And, as I have mentioned before, PrimeBase XT is the first engine to take full advantage of this new feature in MySQL.

And while I am singing my praises let me remind you of 2 other reasons why you should try out PBXT: the engine achieves high concurrency using a pure MVCC implementation (MVCC stands for multi-generational concurrency control, if you want to know why, ask Jim! ;) and great performance with a write-once …

Just a quick reminder: the Hamburg MySQL User Group meets tonight at 7pm at the usual place. See the invitations on Meetup.com or OpenBC/Xing for details - around 25 people have signed up so far, so we should have a great time. Stefan Saasen will give a talk about Ruby on Rails/Active Record. See you there!

Just a quick reminder: the Hamburg MySQL User Group meets tonight at 7pm at the usual place. See the invitations on Meetup.com or OpenBC/Xing for details - around 25 people have signed up so far, so we should have a great time. Stefan Saasen will give a talk about Ruby on Rails/Active Record. See you there!

I blogged about this earlier but the MySQL Conference for 2007 is fast approaching and the call for papers is about to close.  November 7th is the deadline so you've only got two days left to send in those great presentation ideas.  I'm submitting a couple of sessions so hopefully I'll see you there!

C/ODBC v5 comes with some command-line tools such as MYODBCShell. MYODBCShell can be used to interact with the server. It is similar to the mysql command-line tool but it uses ODBC. MYODBCShell is very useful for problem solving ODBC issues (more on this in a later blog) and for simply trying out commands before using them in an ODBC application.

Here are some of the unique features of MYODBCShell;

• is command-line ODBC tool
• can connect via an ODBC DSN
• can connect via a driver connect string
• can invoke catalog calls like SQLTables, SQLColumns, etc
• can be used in batch
• can wrap ResultSet in HTML

You can use MYODBCShell by entering a command-line shell and executing the command MYODBCShell. You may have to change to the directory where MYODBCShell was installed or get it into your PATH. Execute MYODBCShell without arguments to
get information …

Marten Mickos wrote a blog about "hybrid" business models built around open source technology.  He lists a baker's dozen of models where the software is free but there is a revenue source that comes from somewhere else.  For example, there are models like SugarCRM or Zimbra where the base level product is free, but there are additional "enterprise features", or Mozilla where the software is free, but Google and others pay to generate advertising revenue.  A few of the models are slightly tongue-in-cheek.  Still, if you're thinking of getting into open source as a business, you need to be clear how you will make money.  Otherwise, you end up like Borland in model number 11, where the software is free, but you regret it.

Perhaps readers can throw in their own business …

And the link is...
http://www.mysqlconf.com/cs/mysqluc2007/create/e_sess/

I've submitted some papers on scaling and the storage engine
interface for next year's conference. The call for papers ends on the
7th so now is the time to submit all of those crazy schemes, hacks,
and projects you have put together in the last year :)