There have been some interesting MySQL happenings lately. First we had the Enterprise/Community split. I’ll talk more about that in terms of distributions shipping it, as I’ll be liaising with them.

But today, I’m going to talk about Digg. I listen to Diggnation, a surprisingly funny podcast to keep track of the weekly Web happenings. But I’ve never actually paid the site a visit. Until today.

Its the epitome of Web 2.0. User driven content. Its not like Slashdot. I’ve seen many people compare to it, but it isn’t. Slashdot is for tech-content. Digg is for anything. Slashdot has a bunch of editors. Digg is user-edited.

And for users, if your stories get promoted to the front-page, you get ratings. The more ratings, the merrier, right? It probably also increases the trust model, as higher ratings usually mean that you’ve got good news sense. And we all know …

The Sage Group plc has signed a global agreement with MySQL AB which enables Sage to embed MySQL database technology into its world-wide product portfolio.

Talking to the PHP community members, I see a recurring theme:

How does MySQL integrate with PHP — both from a technical and from a licensing perspective?

MySQL provides several ways to integrate between PHP and MySQL, most notably the ext/mysql and ext/mysqli drivers for PHP. These rely on the GPL licensed libmysql library, which by its nature is not compatible with the PHP license. With our not-so-optimally-named “FOSS Exception” , we have extended the rights of our community to use MySQL together with a number of non-GPL FOSS licenses, including the PHP license. This solution works well for many in the PHP community.

But we want to do more:

We plan to develop a pure PHP driver for MySQL, to be licensed under the PHP license itself and donated to the PHP Group …

Although I have absolutely no idea how to create a video, I got a real kick out of the YouTube video Kaj posted earlier: "Do Babies Dream of Being Database Engineers?". And it got me thinking, "I wonder, just wonder, what the MySQL community could come up with if there was a contest for creating a MySQL video...?"

And, thus, after a quick approval from our fearless leader, Mårten, the MySQL Video Contest was born! And here are the rules, that I've just made up off the top of my head.

MySQL Video Contest Rules

1. Absolutely no bashing of other RDBMSs, at least not in bad taste... Make them funny, but not aggressive or derisive. That's not the MySQL way
2. Like it needs to be said, but no profanity of any kind
3. Publish your video to …

At the SDN Day on TechEd 06 Amsterdam I had the pleasure to make a short video with André Labahn from SAP. He's a member of the SDN/SAP team that tries to leverage the usage of scripting languages (PHP, Ruby) together with SAP software, mainly R/3 and other components. As you might know, SAP has some stakeholding into OpenSource, some time ago with their release of SAPDB as "MaxDB" which is now maintained by MySQL. Here's what André has to say about PHP & SAP:

The video is also available on sevenload.de.

Even if you have listed your name on the Participants page of mysqlcamp.org, you need to register.

Granted, the registration page says that all that’s needed to register is to send
Jay Pipes (jay@mysql.com) the following information:

Your Name
Your Company Name
City and State of Residence

And that’s it. So do it today! The conference is free and open to anyone who registers.

So, the camp schedule is coming together nicely. I went ahead and revamped the style and content of the MySQL Camp website entirely, adding a navigation sidebar, a page on the camp T-Shirt Design Contest (sponsored by Baron Schwartz' employer, the Rimm Kaufman Group), the new MySQL Community Server Logo Voting, and a page for a session I am really keen on getting a great discussion going in: A MySQL Core Kernel.

Feel free to vote for your choice of logos; I'm interested to see what the front runners will be (though I have my suspicions...). Tell everyone you know about MySQL Camp. The more folks we get to the …

Vote for your favorite MySQL Community(TM) logo! Add comments on existing logos! Even mock up

http://mysqlcamp.pbwiki.com/LogoVoting

Seriously, though — think of how a new logo will reflect the Community, and how we all want to be perceived. Also consider what makes a nice favicon.ico …..

So vote on something that really matters to you, and make your voice heard. It does not cost anything and takes just a few seconds.

I would have liked to have done this on MySQLForge but, as you know, this is not yet possible. However, if MySQL were to provide even part of their, obviously, excellent development management system for external projects I would be one of the first on board.

In the meantime, PrimeBase XT source code and development will be managed on SourceForge.net: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pbxt.

For new projects it really makes sense to use Subversion instead of CVS, so to get the latest version of the source code you enter the following:

svn checkout https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pbxt/trunk/pbxt pbxt

If you are a Mac OS X user, or your UNIX distribution does not include the Subversion client, you can download it from …

$ svn ci
Connection closed by $MAGIC_IP_ADDR
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly
svn: Your commit message was left in a temporary file:
svn:    '/full/path/to/parent/directory/where/no/changed/files/svn-commit.tmp'
$ svn ci
Log message unchanged or not specified
a)bort, c)ontinue, e)dit
a

could have at least saved the commit message somewhere useful. like, say, somewhere so when i type “svn ci” again it reads the commit message.

grrr