I had need to goto the Wikipedia this morning to review the terminology of something, and on the front page in Today’s featured article is Mercury. Being a tad curious given I’d heard only on the radio a few hours ago that Pluto was no longer a planet in our Solar System, I drilled down to the bottom to check references to other planets (quicker then searching). So at the bottom I found the following graphic and details of The Solar System Summary.

Well blow me down, they didn’t waste any time there. Pluto is no longer a planet in our Solar System. It is now categorised as a …

Helvécio Borges, EAC Software CEO, was awarded by Assespro Brazil as "Personalidade Assespro 30 Anos" in recognition of his efforts to explain and disseminate open source software in Brazil.

Oh, yes. Now, I'm not a huge Slashdot fan in general. Not because there aren't quality news items, reviews, and other geek stuff on there. In fact, there is. I just grew tired a long time ago of having to scroll through page after page of troll comments in order to find any comments of value. In other words, frustrating=5 (if you've never used Slashdot, you won't understand that joke...)

However, today, I had reason to be pleased with Slashdot (a MySQL-run site BTW!), because a review of Mike Kruckenberg and my book, Pro MySQL hit the book review list. Now, granted, it is over a full year since we published the book, but hey, who's paying …

Guy Kawasaki interviews Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL

Had a lovely conversation this afternoon with Leslie Hawthorn, the Googler who has been instrumental in helping with the ongoing sponsorship and logistics of the upcoming MySQL unconference. We went over the details of the Google location to be used as the venue for the event. It just so happens that I am already familiar with the exact area involved, as the team of six or so MySQLers that went to Google in April to give some sessions actually toured through the same location and ate at the same cafeteria that MySQL camp will be housed next to.

I will be adding all of this information to the camp wiki later tonight or tomorrow, but I wanted to blog about the event details here to cast a bit of a wider net. There are currently 13 participants signed up to attend the event, but that does not include a number of MySQLers that I believe will be coming down for the event. It also does not include …

I spend some time on this last night to figure it out with MySQL Cluster NDB API.. Actually, I had to ask my dear colleagues for help. Pekka gave a tip, I added some weird logic: bingo!

Actually, nothing special, but here is the silly code inserting a record into a table with a BLOB field. The oper->equal("id",4) line and the order of things are important. Note: it is missing lots of stuff, like checking for errors!

Enjoy! I might blog more of those silly things later on. Hopefully it makes the manual. Jon, this one is or you!

void blob_insert(Ndb *ndb)
{
         const NdbDictionary::Dictionary* dict = ndb->getDictionary();
         const NdbDictionary::Table *table = dict->getTable("blobby");

         NdbTransaction *trans = ndb->startTransaction();
         NdbOperation *oper = trans->getNdbOperation(table);

         // The data we inserting in the blob field
         char …

Uber-blogger Guy Kawasaki has continued his tradition of asking good questions of technical and business leaders in "Ten Questions with Marten Mickos".  Guy is one of the best speakers and authors in Silicon Valley.  His book "The Art of the Start" is a great resource for anyone thinking of starting a company.

He understands how to get things done and knows that inside the sausage factory sometimes things don't always look so good.  But he's not an armchair quarterback: Guy was chief evangelist at Apple (twice) and is CEO of garage.com Garage Technology Ventures which invests in early stage companies such as iStockPhoto, Kaboodle, SimplyHired and TripWire. Coincidentally, a lot of …

Guy Kawasaki is a prominent blogger who writes about the technology and business world, and usually has some dead-on commentary about working in the corporate world, about technology in general, and about the jungle that is the venture capital world.

Today, he published a ten-question interview with Marten Mickos, MySQL's CEO, which has some great information that shows not only the kind of person that Marten is, but also how he (and others at MySQL) view MySQL's emerging role in the enterprise DBMS community, and the open source community in general.

One of the things I really liked in the article was the following (duh, I am a community guy, after all!):

At MySQL we LOVE users who never pay us money. They are our evangelists. No marketing could do for us what a …

Guy Kawasaki has an interesting interview over on his blog with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL.

Here are a few gems, with my commentary:

In response to the question, "How do you make money with an Open Source product?":

We start by not making money at all - but by making users. The vast community of MySQL users and developers is what drives our business.

Then we sell an enterprise offering to those who need to scale and cannot afford to fail. The enterprise offering consists of certified binaries, updates and upgrades, automated DBA services, 7x24 error resolution, etc. You pay by service level and the number of servers. No nonsense, no special math. Enterprise software buyers are tired of complex pricing models (per core, per cpu, per power unit, per user, per whatever the vendor feels like that day) - models that are still …

In my last post MySQL Benchmarking 1, I was installing Sysbench on a Solaris 10 machine. However I stopped at

./configure

because I was getting compiler errors due to the SUNWsprot and SUNWsprot Sun OS packages not being installed.

After getting them installed on the server I tried to run the ./configure again and this time although the compile process went a little further, it stopped after throwing the following errors.

checking how to run the C preprocessor... /lib/cpp
configure: error: C preprocessor "/lib/cpp" fails sanity check
See `config.log' for more details.