Many people ditch the rat race, to start anything from a one-man show right up to a medium-sized business these days. Globally, computers are being accepted everywhere, and its always been touted to help the business owner, improve business processes. From an open source perspective, how do we help the small business owner?

We start by studying what a small business owner requires:

• contact management - the business is in the network. Without contacts, there’s no exchange of services, and definitely no exchange of money.
• document management - businesses, no matter how large or small, end up with lots of documents. Moving to the e-society that we’re all aiming for, we should aim to manage documents well, right up to the backups of these crucial business data.
• accounting - taxation, income, expense, credit, debit, etc. are what make the business world work. You need to keep track of absolutely every …

In part 1 of this series I examined the behavior of MySQL's FEDERATED storage engine by running a bunch of queries with the general query log enabled on the remote server. In this article I take a higher-level view. I summarize my findings from the first article, then give my thoughts on the engine's strengths and weaknesses.

A while ago I wrote about problem with NULLs and IN/=ANY subqueries MySQL had. I was completely correct when I wrote that the fix won't be simple. It took 3 bug entries (BUG#8804, BUG#24085, BUG#24127), several review iterations by Igor, and the final patch is around 2,300 lines long.

The good news is that this patch solves the problem completely, and it is already in the 5.0.36 tree. The documentation is not yet updated, doing that is now on my todo. There is quite a lot to document: we've had to introduce "switchable access methods", where a table accessed using ref is sometimes accessed using full table scan. (for the impatient: no, the new access method is not …

So, it's now less than 3 months to the MySQL Conference and Expo, and the program is almost final. Over the next few months, I will be blogging daily in a series designed to let the incredible array of conference speakers talk a bit about their sessions and let folks know what makes them tick and what gets them excited about meeting people at the conference.

My first spotlight is on Reggie Burnett. Reggie is a software developer at MySQL who works on the Connectors team and focuses on the Connector/.NET and our Windows-specific tools. He'll be presenting two sessions at the conference this year: MySQL and the Future of ADO.NET and …

There is one bug, or "missing feature" in MySQL Optimizer which may give you hard time causing performance problems which may be hard to track down, it is using only part of the index when full index can be used or using shorter index while there is longer index available. The last item is yet another good reason for removing redundant indexes

Here is example from NNSEEK database:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT thread_id FROM nn2_msg132.msg132   WHERE group_id=398157 AND parent_id=0 AND (published BETWEEN '2006-12-02 00:00:00' AND '2006-12-02 23:59:59')   ORDER BY published DESC LIMIT 0,10 \G
2. *************************** 1. row ***************************
3.       …

PowerShell RTM is finally available for Vista RTM.  Now let's just hope it's faster than all the beta and RCs.

The other day I posted a blog about disruption and I used a screenshot from Visicalc with a link to Dan Bricklin's site.  Dan, along with Bob Frankston, was the co-creator of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet.  These days, Dan has focused on open source software and has now developed wikiCalc, an open source wiki-spreadsheet.  It's written in Perl and available under the GPL through his company Software Garden.  It's also being released under a commercial license by SocialText under the name SocialCalc.  I don't know that wikiCalc is disruptive the way that VisiCalc was 25 years ago, but its a darn good piece of software.

Update:
On the other hand, maybe there's something more important to wikiCalc than the fact that its an opensource, web-based spreadsheet.  There may …

I have just released version 0.9.8 of the PrimeBase XT storage engine for MySQL 5.1. The major feature of this new version is foreign key support. As far as I know, this makes PBXT the first 3rd party storage engine to fully implement referential integrity, and the second after InnoDB.

With this version PBXT is practically feature complete. Only CHECK TABLE remains to be implemented for the first GA release (see pbxt-to-do.txt for details). So my plan to complete the PBXT GA release on time for MySQL 5.1 GA looks quite doable (especially now that I have heard MySQL 5.1 GA has been pushed to 3rd quarter 2007).

The latest package can be downloaded from www.primebase.com/xt or …

The rumours are confirmed: MySQL, the fastest growing database, is planning to go public before the end of the year. This will make it one of the few Open Source products to be listed in the stock market, together with RedHat, Mandriva and VA Linux.

Their results so far are pretty good: around 10 million installations worldwide and 10,000 paying customers (25% of them just in the last year). Many people consider this as a failure, comparing it directly with Oracle’s result, but in my opinion this is a short-sighted vision. MySQL’s main asset are all those non-paying customers; thanks to them most web applications have been built on the LAMP stack, where MySQL plays a key role, and it makes it possible for other businesses to exist, bringing more paying customers without …

Although I am still busy with writing my thesis paper, I do need a distraction from time to time. Since I started getting phpOpenTracker questions again recently, I decided to (slowly) start working on phpOpenTracker 2.0 again. phpOpenTracker 2.0 will be a complete rewrite, utilizing the features of PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.1.

The biggest problem with phpOpenTracker 1.x is that its database schema is normalized. Even simple …