Several months ago, it became clear that one could crack a SHA-1 message digest. It was still a nontrivial problem, but it could be done thousands of times faster than brute-force guessing. So SHA-1 has become undesirable as a secure message digest, and U.S. federal software security standards now call for software to use SHA-256 (one of the group of algorithms which comprise SHA-2).MySQL

SpikeSource and JasperSoft to Deliver Open Source Business Intelligence Applications, JasperSoft / SpikeSource (Press Release)

ActiveGrid Names Former BEA and Adobe Veteran Todd Hay New VP of Marketing, ActiveGrid (Press Release)

Five Reasons I’m Not Worried About Red Hat, Linux Magazine, Bryan Richard (Article)

OSDL: Patent Infringement Not a Real Open-Source Threat, eWeek, Peter Galli (Article)

Gartner on Open Source Databases, TheOpenForce.com, Zack Urlocker (Blog)

…

Zack Urlocker is at the Gartner Open Source Summit this week, and has been hearing some good things about open source databases. Open source databases (Sleepycat, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.) have been around for a long time, but the analysts didn't give them much credit because even though everyone was using them, few were paying for them. Or so they thought. Now, however, open source databases are becoming big business.

Zack cites Gartner's Donald Feinberg:

Overall, Gartner is predicting that the worldwide DBMS market is around $14 billion and will continue to grow by nearly 7% per year. If this was a new market, it would not be a very impressive growth rate, but for a market of this size, it's huge. And there can be lots of movement within the market. We are at …

New Atlanta, just released Beta 1 of version 7 of thier BlueDragon CFML application server.

Below is a list of the new features - I think the IsNull function and null keyword will prove to be quite handy.

• Multi-threaded programming (CFTHREAD, and related tags and functions)
• Interfaces and Abstract CFCs
• null keyword and IsNull() function
• CFQUERY Enhancements
  • CACHEDUNTILCHANGE attribute
  • BACKGROUND attribute
• Application.cfc
  • onClientStart() handler
  • onMissingTemplate() handler
• CFDOCUMENT
• CFCHART
• CFSEARCH Enhancements
  • support for Word and PDF documents …

While laying in bed last night thinking about getting started on a project that requires getting a fresh MySQL clustered database up and running I got to thinking. What is the best OS for MySQL from a minimalistic point of view? If you're starting from scratch to set up a server, or farm of servers, to run MySQL and can choose any OS, what do you choose?

I'm going to venture that it's a Unix variant, perhaps a flavor of Linux? There's a lot to think about in terms of what types of data and how the application will use the database, but from a general point of view where would one start? Let's suppose that the hardware is your typical generic AMD/Intel with high-end SCSI disks.

I'm thinking about things like:

• 
  
• minimal OS footprint (only necessary applications/libraries)
  
• minimal OS processes
  
• a kernel optimized for MySQL-specific functions, minized for …

A few days in the job for MySQL and still, even though I can't say I have mastered the tasks at hand (too much to get used to!) I tasted the feeling of working with perople living in different time zones.
To make this feeling more real, I went to a Chinese shop a few blocks down my street and I bought six cheap clocks. I know that I could use the net but the tangible clocks give me a sense of being in a "real office"!

A few days in the job for MySQL and still, even though I can't say I have mastered the tasks at hand (too much to get used to!) I tasted the feeling of working with perople living in different time zones.
To make this feeling more real, I went to a Chinese shop a few blocks down my street and I bought six cheap clocks. I know that I could use the net but the tangible clocks give me a sense of being in a "real office"!

Lorenzo has startet working on better charset support in MDB2. He has added basic support for setting charsets and collations inside field definitions in CVS already. However, there are still plenty of open questions to look at. I have only limited experience with charsets in MySQL. Lorenzo has some experience with Firebird and PostgreSQL. But this is no where near sufficient to come up with a solution that would work reasonably well across all supported drivers. Check out his charset RFC on his blog. Comments are very much appreciated, even if they just highlight problems without giving a solution just yet.