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 …

Below are a couple of links to examples of loadable engines for the next 5.1 Beta of MySQL

http://hg.tangent.org/memcache_engine?ca=tip;type=gz
http://hg.tangent.org/table_function_engine?ca=tip;type=gz

This should give you a head start in having compatible engines once the 5.1.12 release is made.

The main changes?

* Engines are no longer required to be designed with a global handlerton (you can keep context now in the plugin).
* The handlerton structure is now created and passed in to the init method for the engine (or any plugin)
* There are two placceholders in the plugin structure for work Antony is doing for variables.
* You now need to declare the license the engine is under (and this …

I think the most interesting announcement made at the Boston MySQL Meetup tonight was by a man who I'd seen before but couldn't place. I didn't think it had been at a previous MySQL meetup. He sat down when things were getting going and said something like:

I have some exciting news . . . [long pause] . . . the next release of Perl 6 will be in 3 days!!

While it was interesting to me and a few of the other Perl folks in the room, the reality was that this exciting news was met by mostly blank faces. After a few moments someone suggested that perhaps the next room over, where the Perl user's group was meeting tonight, was probably the place he was looking for. Sorry to turn such an exciting announcement into such a deflating experience. I realized then that I knew the face from my sporadic visits to the Boston.pm user group.

It is a good reminder to check in on what's …

Like many other in the “Hacks” series, this book offers 100 tips and tricks for making the most of your database through querying.

See more information at:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sqlhks/

It is about to be published (Nov. 2006). I believe you can order the final cut (as opposed to the “rough cut”), although last week they were still advertising it as a rough cut…now you can order it online, in a print book or to read on Safari.

As a technical editor for this book, I have read through all of it (or at least, all of it that was there in the draft I received) and I can say it is definitely worth the $30 USD. Most of the examples at the time I read it were in MySQL format (though they might have changed that to be more fair to other databases); while it has some material for DB2 and Access, it’s mostly a book for MySQL, Oracle and SQL …

fulltext, fulltext search, match, text text search

Life is slowly returning to order once again. I am attempting to slog through almost 1,000 messages in my MySQL folder, most of which are list questions that have already been answered, so it does not take long to get through them. However, occasionally I find a question that has not been answered, or a gem of a question that I want to expose to a wider audience.

This question fell under both categories. Basically, someone wanted stopwords in other languages, and wondered if there was a place to get them. (English stopwords …

Next week we'll have two major customer conferences in Europe, featuring some of our most talented MySQLers on best practices, performance tuning, high availability and product roadmap including some important announcements for enterprise customers.  There will also be presentations from executives, customers as well as from our partner Unisys.  Space is limited, so be sure to sign up in advance. 

• London October 17 - Hilton London Paddington
• Munich October 19 - Hilton Munich Park

I haven't had the chance to get back to blogging lately. This really is a quandry - there is so much going on at Pentaho and around the Pentaho community, I have so much to blog about... but there is so much going on at Pentaho, I haven't found the time to blog! :) So today's a fun day, because I get to catch you all up on so many great things that are happening to and for the Pentaho community.

SourceForge.net Project of the Month
Let's start with Pentaho being honored as the SourceForge Project of the Month. If you have worked with open source for even a short while, you have heard of SourceForge.net. It is THE place to go to download open source software and source code. I have heard the number of projects hosted on SourceForge.net to be somewhere around 130,000, so to be chosen and highlighted as …

Oprofile is a profiling tool that requires no instrumentation and can profile an entire system. Binaries with symbol tables (-g compiled binaries) and an uncompressed Kernel with symbol table are helpful.

Oprofile is capable of monitoring and analyzing a running -g compiled mysqld and can tell you which functions are using the most CPU time.

Sample output:
CODE:CPU: CPU with timer interrupt, speed 0 MHz (estimated)
Profiling through timer interrupt
samples  %        image name               symbol name
…

At our days there is a lot of books on different languages, technologies, databases and etc, and sometimes it is a difficult to make a good choice. As for me I don’t like books with humor, curious cases with author’s pets and other flood. I don’t like and I do not want to spend my time for reading such things. Also I do not want to spend time for incompetent authors. So from all MySQL books I have ever seen I think only two are really good enough: official documentation ? MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide. And no matter your MySQL experience you’ll find a lot of new and usefull things.