Some time ago, I sent an internal message to all the MySQL employees challenging/pleading for anyone who had coding skills but was not involved on the development team to jump in and help fix bugs. Several kind people took me up on that challenge, and Jay has now blogged about his experience and the steps involved in fixing a MySQL server bug. It’s an excellent and detailed explanation of how to set up your linux (or Mac) development environment, and how to add a test case to our regression test suite to be sure the bug never comes back. One suggestion - I recommend using compile-pentium-debug-max instead compile-pentium-debug, as the max build script turns on a lot more things in the code which you want to be tested when you run the regression test suite.

Hmm, I wonder if anyone would …

Slashdot carried a story earlier today entitled "Why Is Commercial OSS So Expensive?" He was referring to embedded software, and his experience is 100% contrary to my own experience. (My background is in open source embedded software.) He says:

Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-. We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock....After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas. Except for that embedded Linux (slated for WinCE or VxWorks substitution), we are not OSS shop anymore.Taking the author at his word - that commercial open source is, in fact, expensive (has he tried the alternatives?) - I think he's …

If you're a programmer, you know the difference between a beginner and a master is the ability to write succinct code that does a great deal with very little work. If you can do this, you can easily raise your productivity and the quality of your work by an order of magnitude. Much more importantly, you can have a lot more fun writing code. Read on to learn how.

Stephen de Vries sent an email to SecurityFocus's web application security mailing list earlier today to comment on the new Google Code Search:

Google's code search provides an easy way to find obvious software flaws in open source and example applications.

He provided a few example queries to illustrate his point:

• XSS in Java Applications
• SQL Injection in Java Applications
• …

I've written about Hyperic before when they open sourced their stack management and monitoring software.  Hyperic's HQ product is the best way to manage a software stack in production, whether it's an open source LAMP stack, a closed source stack or, more likely, a hybrid combination.  The HQ product was a spinoff from Covalent and was in development for several years before it was open sourced earlier this year.  CEO Javier Soltero had a vision for creating a company around the technology and he's been able to do just that without compromising on the things that have made the technology successful. 

HQ is an extensible system and so not only does it monitor all kinds of operating systems, web servers, app servers and database servers, but it can be extended to monitor just about any kind of application, both at a technical level and at a business level.  One of …

Today I tried on my database the WITH QUERY EXPANSION clause on a fulltext search.

I manage the website of a famous italian soccer club (www.inter.it), and we have hundreds of thousands of pictures of actual and former players, coaches, events and so on.
Every day a back-office tool involve our web editors in finding pictures based on captions. I developed such a feature using a simple full-text search.

So, let's try to find all pictures about "goalkeepers" (unfortunately this word is not mainly used in picture captions)

mysql> select count(*) from media where match(caption_en) against('goalkeeper');
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 60       |
+----------+


Let's try now the same query using WITH QUERY EXPANSION

mysql> select …

Today I tried on my database the WITH QUERY EXPANSION clause on a fulltext search.

I manage the website of a famous italian soccer club (www.inter.it), and we have hundreds of thousands of pictures of actual and former players, coaches, events and so on.
Every day a back-office tool involve our web editors in finding pictures based on captions. I developed such a feature using a simple full-text search.

So, let’s try to find all pictures about “goalkeepers” (unfortunately this word is not mainly used in picture captions)

mysql> select count(*) from media where match(caption_en) against('goalkeeper');
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 60       |
+----------+


Let’s try now the same query using WITH QUERY EXPANSION

mysql> select …

Fonality Acquires trixbox, World’s Largest Asterisk-Based Community, Fonality (Press Release)

SugarCRM Launches SugarExchange, a Global Marketplace for CRM Applications, SugarCRM (Press Release)

IBM Expands Open Source Contributions to Further Enable Web 2.0 Adoption, IBM (Press Release)

Red Hat Builds Strength in the Channel, Red Hat (Press Release)

SpikeSource Brings Business-Ready Open Source Applications to SMEs and Large Enterprises Across Europe, …

Recently, we've seen a number of excellent contributions to the MySQL server, and we're talking with Kevin Burton about possibly integrating his excellent lbpool work into the Connector suite. Jeremy Cole has written a number of patches for small, but very useful, feature enhancements to the main server — namely the ability to do a SHOW PROFILE trace of calls during statement execution, host cache improvements for 5.0, and some nice utility functions for trigger/procedure diagnostics. Bill Karwin has submitted a patch which …

It looks like there's going to be a MySQL Meetup forming in the Phoenix area. A few of us are planning to get together next month for an inaugural meeting. There seems to be any number of people in the Valley of the Sun who are interested in MySQL or related topics, so it will be interesting to see if this meetup gets off the ground and attracts any sort of meaningful membership.