Wondering what the Oracle announcement of Unbreakable Linux has done for Oracle, and to Red Hat? The results aren't pretty, but the company getting pounded might surprise you:

Note to Mr. Ellison: Better try a different strategy. This one is not working, as Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports.) And I'm not talking about Oracle providing commercial support for MySQL. I somehow think that will be even less successful.

Just work on supporting your own software.

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My MySQL Sandalcamp proposal made the cut for the upcoming MySQL Conference. I hope that I will see some of you down in Santa Clara in April.

One of our clients found a bug with dbms_scheduler: it logs a job as successful when a ORA-01403 is thrown.

SQL> create or replace procedure x_no_data_found is v_dummy varchar2(1); begin select dummy into v_dummy from dual [...]

So, in Europe the street name comes first, then the number of the building.
In the US the number of the building comes first, then the actual street, which makes it a little bit rougher to sort.

Imagine a table like this:

mysql> SELECT * FROM numsort;

+——+
| a |
+——+
| 5 |
| a |
| 2 |
| d |
| 22 |
| c |
| 33 |
| 3 |
+——+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

The desired order in this case would be 2, 3, 5, 22, 33, a, b, c, d.

mysql> SELECT * FROM numsort ORDER BY a;
+——+
| a |
+——+
| 2 |
| 22 |
| 3 |
| 33 |
| 5 |
| a |
| c |
| d |
+——+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Ok, we’re far from what we’re …

Every so often someone will ask me "What is this pushbuild thing I
hear MySQL developers talk about?"

The answer is that it is an automated build system that we "push"
code into. It was written by Kristian Nielsen a little over a year
ago. When using BitKeeper you have to "push" code to another
repository. In CVS or Subversion you just commit to one repository,
BitKeeper put the concept of distributed versioning into people's
minds (and its a very powerful tool for distributed development). I
really can not imagine using a non-distributed revision control
system any longer.

What we look for in development, and releases, is a "green tree". The
nice thing about pushbuild is that I can see how my builds work on
different platforms. For example I don't do windows programming but
via pushbuild I can see if my code built on Windows. I've used …

rPath raises an additional $9.1M in funding…Solid shares its 2007 plans for MySQL…Novell launches a training program for Red Hat migrations…and more…

rPath Continues Momentum with Addition of $9.1M in Funding, rPath (Press Release)

Solid Unveils Plan To Deliver Additional Mission-Critical Database Capabilities To MySQL Users, Solid Information Technology (Press Release)

Novell launches New Training to Ease Red Hat-to-SUSE Linux Migration, Novell (Press Release)

Sun and …

So while flying to Boston I started thinking a bit more about how releases work in a calendar year and how open source releases work in general.

What made me first think about this was developer quorum.

What is developer quorum?

Developer Quorum is any period of time where you have enough developers to complete a release or undertake a major distribution of software. To release software you really must take it into account.

For a US/European company like MySQL we see two of these periods a year:

Last week of November through the Second Week of January.
June 20th through the first week of August.

These periods are a result of the cumulative nature of the holidays for multiple countries. While there are always people around, maybe up to two-thirds at any point, you will be missing critical people.

I've yet to see an influence by China, but …

Many people ditch the rat race, to start anything from a one-man show right up to a medium-sized business these days. Globally, computers are being accepted everywhere, and its always been touted to help the business owner, improve business processes. From an open source perspective, how do we help the small business owner?

We start by studying what a small business owner requires:

• contact management - the business is in the network. Without contacts, there’s no exchange of services, and definitely no exchange of money.
• document management - businesses, no matter how large or small, end up with lots of documents. Moving to the e-society that we’re all aiming for, we should aim to manage documents well, right up to the backups of these crucial business data.
• accounting - taxation, income, expense, credit, debit, etc. are what make the business world work. You need to keep track of absolutely every …

In part 1 of this series I examined the behavior of MySQL's FEDERATED storage engine by running a bunch of queries with the general query log enabled on the remote server. In this article I take a higher-level view. I summarize my findings from the first article, then give my thoughts on the engine's strengths and weaknesses.

A while ago I wrote about problem with NULLs and IN/=ANY subqueries MySQL had. I was completely correct when I wrote that the fix won't be simple. It took 3 bug entries (BUG#8804, BUG#24085, BUG#24127), several review iterations by Igor, and the final patch is around 2,300 lines long.

The good news is that this patch solves the problem completely, and it is already in the 5.0.36 tree. The documentation is not yet updated, doing that is now on my todo. There is quite a lot to document: we've had to introduce "switchable access methods", where a table accessed using ref is sometimes accessed using full table scan. (for the impatient: no, the new access method is not …