I had dinner with Fabrizio, a good friend and CEO of Funambol, the leading mobile open source company. He was in Salt Lake to ski and was kind enough to call me so that we could hang out.

Fabrizio said some things about open source that rang true with me, which I had not considered before. I'll list two principles he mentioned, and will discuss each in turn:

1. Don't upsell your community, and

2. Sell open source to those who don't like/trust open source.

At first glance, Fabrizio's principles fly in the face of most open source businesses out there. But when you scratch the surface of his thinking you see that it actually undergirds the most successful open source businesses. Let me explain.

Fabrizio's first principle - …

I’ve just recently released a new version of libmygis, a library for dealing with various GIS formats. Its main purpose is importing ESRI Shapefile data into MySQL’s GIS, but it is useful for much more.

There are many new small features in libmygis 0.7, but the biggest new feature is projection support (and automatic re-projection) via the PROJ.4 cartographic library. With support for projections and the ability to read Shapefile PRJ files, libmygis is getting much closer to having full support for the Shapefile format.  This means you can easily import Shapefiles in any projection into MySQL and deal with it in pure lat/lon, which is what you’ll need in order to interface with outside tools such as …

I've been told I should start blogging about the fun projects I work on. Here is a start to this endeavor!

I recently left the employment of MySQL to work at Grazr. What is Grazr you ask? It's a great new tool that allows you to view as many feeds as you like without subscribing. It's a client-server architecture, where the client is Ajax/javascript with a great UI that lets you have a "tree" of feeds. It utilises OPML as the structure which it displays feeds. You can read more about it at http://www.grazr.com, since I'm new and I think the site does a much better job at explaining what Grazr is all about.

I look forward to utilising all the good things I've learned while at MySQL for Grazr. The things I will most definitely use are MySQL itself such as replication, various storage engines, stored procedures, and great GUI tools which I didn't use much as a core …

Finally, episode 5 is here. In this episode, the first part in a two-part series about Falcon, the new storage engine provided by MySQL, we talk about what happens when you query a Falcon table, going over and explaining MVCC and the record cache. Next episode will go over the serial logs and indexes.

Direct play episode 5 at:
http://tinyurl.com/y68ewn

Subscribe to the podcast by clicking:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=206806301

You can Direct download all the oursql podcasts at:
http://technocation.org/podcasts/oursql/

Jim Starkey is a great speaker, and very funny to listen to ? at one point he refers to a performance hit as a …

lca2007 already totally rocks.

did the speaker thing this morning, which was awesome (and i won’t spoil the surprise)

mysql miniconf today, should rock.

It looks like MySQL AB is going about the code fork in a very methodical, gradual, and thoughtful fashion. The latest Community release seems evidence of this. It was released as source-only, as promised, however it was announced that since no community contributions have been made to the community tree, the release was made from the Enterprise tree. In effect, the actual fork has not taken place yet. There is a community tree in evidence in BitKeeper, but it appears to be a placeholder only so far. The changes to date have been with regard to policy and procedure, not code.

I see this as a good thing. This gives MySQL time to evaluate reactions to these changes while implementing them in a gradual fashion. The changes appear well thought out and sound, and reflect changes in the community, the marketplace, and the customer base. It's important to balance all of these factors since they all play a part in the life of the product. …

Two weeks into the New Year, and four weeks since I got back from Thailand, I finally get round to updating this thing. By “updating”, I don’t just mean posting. Gojira the One-Lung Webserver has had an overhaul as well: I’ve added some more RAM, caught up with the last couple of months’ worth of Windows 2000 patches, updated to the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, WordPress, and Cygwin. (Tip: If you’re running PHP and MySQL on Windows, be sure to get rid of the libMySQL.dll that comes with PHP — because it’s crap — and to use the version that comes with MySQL instead.)

So… 2006 was a pretty decent year, with a number of positive changes:

• I got to see my daughter grow up some more. She’s just more amazing every time I see her.
• I got out of the hell-hole of a house that I’d lived in for 3 years. I must admit that I had some mixed emotions about that. I’d lived there …

While MySQL customers have been bitterly complaining about the move to package support and rigorous testing of binaries into a paid package, Stephen Walli of Optaros has been thinking:

What if Microsoft SQL Server open sourced their codebase, provided support and testing of binaries in a paid package similar to MySQL Network, and “DB mashups” ensued?

http://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/01/microsoft_and_m.html

It’s an interesting read to get you thinking. Most of my thought was, “that’d be neat….I wonder if folks would stop complaining about the MySQL Enterprise and Community models if that actually happened.”

Flying to Boston this morning, I have a talk to give at MIT tomorrow, and will spend the rest of the week with the MySQL Falcon team.

So how is security this morning?

The raver chick in front of me in line had a "gallon bag" which the
agent spent ten minutes on trying to help her sort through. He
wouldn't let her friend take anything from the bag and pack it in her
own.

"Sorry, it is her stuff and she is limited to the advertised amount."

He helped her sort out the liquid items since she had the bag
completely filled.

He put the glitter in the liquid bag.

Glitter is a liquid?

Now it floats in air so it is sort of a fluid... not really.

This doesn't matter to me at all though.

Why is that?

Did I …

Continuing MySQL saga… This is actually a follow up on my previous post. Developers tried to rewrite all statements and even overdid it. As we say in Russia - “teach fool how to pray and he will break his forehead”. Note, I had to rename columns/tables as I write so sorry for possible typos Query converted by [...]