When I loaded GigaBytes of XMLs into mysql database with PHP script, I was thinking about PHP alternatives. Why do I need that ?
1. PHP is slow - I'm speaking about area of data processing and implementation of algorithms
2. No good cli debugger - I'm just tired of debugging with 'echo' and 'var_dump'
3. Unpredictable memory consumption - it's easy in processing of big files to eat all available memory
4. Need something new - I've been using PHP for almost 10 years, so I want to try something else to refresh my mind.

List of my requirements:
- Stable binding to MySQL, support of new protocol with prepared statement is necessary.
- good XML handling
- Fast in terms of performance and development
- multiplatform, at least Linux, Windows, Solaris necessary
- under active development and wide community
- web binding
- not Java (I don't like it, as most PHP-guys, I …

Back in July, we made an Eclipse documentation plug-in of the MySQL manuals available for users to download.

In truth, the Eclipse documentation format is actually just HTML; you have to combine the HTML with a plug-in manifest that details the documentation, version number etc so that the documentation is loaded and identified as a valid plug-in element when Eclipse is started.

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On Friday, EU internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy (whose historical ties with Microsoft and similar companies are mentioned in my book) delivered this speech on his intellectual property rights (IPR) strategy. He flew all the way up to Helsinki for an informal meeting of the ECOFIN (economic & finance) Council of the European Union.

In his speech, he said the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) “is a goal worth pursuing” and that he wanted to involve the EU in the EPLA negotiations “and bring them to finality”. He falsely claims that the EPLA would “offer valuable cost savings”: even Nokia and pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline have already pointed out that …

I fixed a couple of typos in my book No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union. Thanks to Marco Menardi for having pointed me to those typos.

Continuent Ships uni/cluster for MySQL / PostgreSQL , Continuent (Press Releases)

When open source is not enough, The Register, Nick Kew (Article)

Ludd vs. open source, ZDNet, Dana Blankenhorn (Blog)

On Red Hat and Commercial Open Source, JM’s Good Times, John Mark Walker (Blog)

JRuby Steps Into the Sun, Headius, …

I have a number of PHP related speaking gigs coming up:

• DC PHP
• ApacheCon
• Zend/PHP Conference

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Next Monday's MySQL Meetup in San Francisco should be lots of fun. We'll meet at JasperSoft (303 2nd Street, Suite 450) at 7:00 PM, Mon 11 Sep., and have special guest Teodor Danciu, the creator and architect of Jasper Reports. The guys from JasperSoft will also show off some freely available reports for Bugzilla, and I'm going to give a quick 5-slide presentation on the MySQL Roadmap.

Trudy Pelzer, Engineering Project Manager extraordinaire at MySQL, has added a new section to the Forge wiki detailing the design specs for a proposed simple data auditing functionality for future versions of MySQL. Feel free to provide Trudy your feedback on the proposal and comment either on the Wiki itself, or email Trudy personally at trudy at mysql dot com. What exactly is the simple data auditing functionality?

Well, the proposal outlines essentially an updated logging mechanism that combines some of the features of the slow query log, general query log, and other mechanisms into a method of auditing commands, authentication, and even errors, to log files (or tables) within the server. Essentially, we're talking about writing log tables of everything that goes on inside the server, to ensure that in the case of an audit or a security breach, it is …

I'll be giving a presentation on MySQL performance tuning at the Ohio LinuxFest on September 30th. It will be a discussion about performance tuning guidelines, indexing concepts, benchmarking and profiling guidelines, and other such goodies. There will be some big names giving sessions at the conference, including Jon "maddog" Hall, Jeff Waugh and Jorge Castro from Ubuntu. Come on down and say Hi. Admission is free, so no excuses!

Have you ever seen index which refused to be used even if there is every reason for it to work (from the glance view):

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM article WHERE article_id=10;
2. +----+-------------+---------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+
3. | id | select_type | TABLE   | type | possible_keys | KEY  | key_len | ref  | rows  | Extra       |
4. +----+-------------+---------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+
5. |  1 | SIMPLE      | article | ALL  | PRIMARY       | NULL | NULL    | NULL | 93490 | USING WHERE |
6. +----+-------------+---------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+
7. 1 row IN SET (0.00 sec)

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