I'm still reading through BusinessWeek's interview with Steve Ballmer, and still fascinated. Love him or hate him, Ballmer is a smart guy.

Ballmer refused to call the YouTube valuation ($1.65B) overvalued. He rightly said that it depends on a lot of factors (factors, incidentally, that I don't personally think add up, but I'm willing to be wrong):

You're clear as a bell on the YouTube valuation…
No. I'm not saying it is overvalued. I'm not trying to say that. It depends on a set of factors. I'm not saying I wouldn't write a check for that amount of money. I might.

Really, even though there's no identifiable business model?
It is one of those things where you have to think. You can't punt either way. If you're asking me if I would …

Some interesting things happened today…

We released a new MySQL server a few days ago, and that consequently means we’ve got a new Connector/PHP available for download. Go get ext/mysqli and ext/mysql against 5.0.26 while its hot.

And while we do support ext/mysql, we’d rather you (and your applications) used ext/mysqli. After all, wouldn’t you like to be able to use the new, much touted features that came post MySQL 4.1, like Views, Stored Procedures, Triggers, Precision Math, and so on?

So to make it a complete no brainer, we released a MySQLi Converter Tool. Its also available via subversion. The tool is branched off Revision 11 (in …

In today’s vote on its patent policy resolution, the European Parliament approved the compromise text I had previously reported on, but it also voted in favor of a few amendments.

The most notable amendment was number 7. It inserted the subclause “which address concerns about democratic control, judicial independence and litigation costs” into article 1. Two of those three concerns (judicial independence and litigation costs) had been mentioned by commissioner McCreevy in his speech in the EP on September 28. But it was a good idea for the EP to reinforce those points.

Dutch …

The comments on my article how to find duplicate rows with SQL made me realize I was simplifying things too much. In particular, I really glossed over the "how to delete duplicate rows" section, which I should have explained in more detail. I hope this article will remedy the omissions.

I hate to start the blog post with the same "I've been really busy excuse" but honestly that's the truth. Ever since I wrote the last post, one important thing happened to me. My dentist prescribed me a mouth wash and it turned out that I was severely allergic to it. My upper lip became extremely swollen and remained like that for couple of days until I got a shot of steroid. Ughh, it was really painful. Anyways, time has just been flying by and I have a lot of catching up to do.

This is the part 4 of MySQL Benchmarking series. In the last post I showed you how you can compile Sysbench on Solaris 10. In this post, I will be showing you how you can compile Super-Smack on Solaris 10.

MySQL Super Smack was originally developed by Sasha Pachev (sasha at surveypro dot com), a former MySQL employee. After Sasha, Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! took over the maintenance of …

Warp Networks has been selected by MySQL AB to become an Authorized MySQL Training Center (AMEC) in Spain, offering certified MySQL education in Zaragoza. Courses will be offered on MySQL 5.0, the latest version of the world?s most popular open source database.

When people discuss query optimization on MySQL, or say a query doesn’t perform well, they usually mention execution time. Execution time is important, but it’s not the only metric to use (or even the best). There are many other ways to measure the work a query requires. This article explains how to really profile a query – what to measure, how to do it as accurately as possible, and what it means.

People frequently ask if they can do fancy things in triggers, such as writing to the filesystem, sending an email, or notifying other applications of data changes.I always recommend against doing things like this. Calling an external processes from a trigger or UDF is very difficult to get right, and it is very easy to cause serious problems with your application.Say for instance that you want

Ray Noorda, former CEO and Chairman of networking software giant Novell, passed away Monday at the age of 82 from Alzheimer's disease.  While Novell has had its share of ups and downs in recent years, Noorda deserves credit for launching PC networking and turning Novell into a billion dollar powerhouse software company in the 1990s.  For those old enough to remember, getting PCs connected together to handle email and file & printer sharing was a godsend; Netware made it possible and became the de facto standard.  Netware enabled millions of developers to create networked applications.  Netware's resellers and certified engineers were tremendously loyal to Novell and enabled the company to transform itself into an open source company in recent years.

• Salt Lake Tribune: …

Carly Fiorina, former CEO of HP, is out promoting her autobiography "Tough Choices" which goes on sale Monday.  While Fiorina may not view her termination as performance related, HP shareholders or employees are likely to have a different opinion. 

Fiorina was famous for missing her publicly stated revenue objectives, then blaming and subsequently firing key executives.  As a result, HP's stock fell by 56% during her six year tenure.  Fiorina's approach was all about building the brand --not necessarily HP's brand, but hers.  She focused on PR, keynotes at big conferences, media interviews and a …