I greatly admire the works of the Dutch literary author Gerard Reve (1923 - 2006). On many occasions, he was asked whether his stories were real-life stories, and he always answered like this:

If you mean "did this sequence of events factually take place?" then I can be brief: No. And that's a good thing too, because if a writer would describe reality, the result would be very hard to believe, if not completely inconceivable. The course taken by real life is just too crazy. A true description is bound to be seem like a constructed mannerism and no reader can be expected to believe even one word of it.
However, as far as the single events are concerned, I exclusively use only those things bourne from reality.

If you ever read The Daily WTF you will probably agree that this point of view …

MySQL Enterprise — Double your DBA Staff without Adding Headcount, MySQL (Press Release)

Ingres Opens Its Doors in India to Satisfy Growing Demand for Business Open Source Software, Ingres (Press Release)

Free Standards Group Teams with O?Reilly Media to Offer Linux Developer Services, Free Standards Group (Press Release)

Hyperic Enhances Enterprise-Class Software Security, Hyperic (Press Release)

Zimbra Soars Past Four Million Paid Mailbox Milestone, Zimbra (Press Release)

…

There's a slightly humorous interview with Steve Jobs in NewsWeek by Steven Levy about the success of the iPod.  Jobs does a good job providing some insight into what makes products successful.  But his comments on Microsoft's forthcoming Zune portable audio player sound like like's giving dating tips:

Q. Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?
In a word, no. I've seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off …

This is the fourth in a series of articles on profiling MySQL. My past three articles have explained how to measure the work a query causes MySQL to do. In this article I introduce a tool I’ve written to do the work for you and produce a compact, readable report of that work, with all the math already done, and the measurements labelled and grouped for ease of comprehension. With this tool you can understand query performance at a glance.

ZCS 4.0.3 includes fixes for 55 bugs and enhancements. It has significant improvements in calendar behavior and fixes a bug in Trash folder viewing that was troubling many folks. It also includes upgrade speed improvements. This allows the upgrade to take much better advantage of installs that have multiple disks available to MySQL.

Zimbra - Forums - Zimbra Collaboration Suite 4.0.3 Released

ZCS 4.0.3 includes fixes for 55 bugs and enhancements. It has significant improvements in calendar behavior and fixes a bug in Trash folder viewing that was troubling many folks. It also includes upgrade speed improvements. This allows the upgrade to take much better advantage of installs that have multiple disks available to MySQL.

Zimbra - Forums - Zimbra Collaboration Suite 4.0.3 Released

Ok, someone came in #oracle on freenode and wanted a query that would give him a distinct set of rows, where it did not matter if a values is in the first or second column.

Here is a sample table:

CREATE TABLE t (
  a int(11) NOT NULL,
  b int(11) NOT NULL
);

INSERT INTO t (a, b) VALUES (1, 2);
INSERT INTO t (a, b) VALUES (2, 1);
INSERT INTO t (a, b) VALUES (3, 4);
INSERT INTO t (a, b) VALUES (3, 6);
INSERT INTO t (a, b) VALUES (4, 3);
INSERT INTO t (a, b) VALUES (6, 3);

The output should be something like:

(1, 2), (3, 4), (3, 6)
OR
(2, 1), (3, 4), (3, 6)
OR
(6, 3), (2, 1), (3, 4)
etc ..

You get the drift ..

A self join solves the challenge, though we were wondering if any RDBMS out there could do it without a self-join by just using funky analytic features. Any RDBMS specific magic goes (except for implementing a join inside a stored procecure of course). Lets see what …

We have released a new set of bits. The solidDB for MySQL Beta 4 is now out. Like the previous release, it is primarily intended as a bug fix release. Pessimistic concurrency control is now in the product, although it still needs additional testing and is therefore not officially listed as supported in the documentation. ¶

I posted earlier about the MySQL announcement (see http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article_1171.html )and how I see it affecting Enterprise level users.

However, as someone who uses it for work other than my day job, some at the hobby level and some above that level, the Community edition is also important to me.

The way I see it, the changes are great for people who use the Community edition.

Wait, there will be 2 codebases, and they have not doubled their staff, so won’t there actually be less development? Are they expecting the community to write all the code for the Community edition?

Kind of. I do know that MySQL has been hiring lots of people, but I’m not an employee, so I have no idea of their growth. There will be 2 codebases, but that works out for the best for everyone. Now, there will be 2 …