At OSCON next week, I'm giving a presentation entitled Making Sales While Making Friends: Lessons Learned from Open Source Businesses. I'm in the middle of preparing it, and also reflecting on some conversations I had earlier this week with sales executives from MySQL, Red Hat, JasperSoft, and SugarCRM.

In the course of those conversations, I was surprised by how differently we supposedly similar open source companies run our operations. We're each an open source company, but with varying licensing, sales, and support models. That's a good thing.

But it's also a perplexing thing if you're trying to weave together a common theme between them.

After our meeting, I spent some time on Sourceforge, pulling download data and correlating it to company revenues for these and other open source companies. After awhile, similarities started to …

Many people have complained that the new MySQL Forum misses an appropriate navigation. Now it's back:



Stay tuned - more enhancements are to come!

Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB, answers a variety of questions about MySQL AB and the MySQL Server on the german "Pro-Linux" news site. Worth a read, if you understand german...

Yesterday I received a sample copy of the "SUSE Linux 10.1 OSS - vorkon" DVD, which was assembled by Nicolaus Millin. While I have not installed it yet (as I by now have a very well running installation of SUSE Linux 10.1 on my laptop), the content of the DVD sounds very promising. In addition to incorporating all the updates that have been published since SUSE Linux 10.1 was released (around 100), this version also includes additional drivers like the 3D graphics drivers from ATI and nVidia, network card drivers like ndiswrapper, madwifi and rt2500 as well as drivers for AVM products and Logitech QuickCams. So the base system should already run very smooth …

OK, so next week is OSCON, in case you hadn't heard... I will be presenting a tutorial entitled Maximum Velocity MySQL on Monday morning, from 8:30am until noon, in room Portland 255. The tutorial will cover advanced SQL, schema and index strategies, and performance tuning topics, with lots of code examples and demonstrations. It should be a great time, and there'll be lots of giveaways, so be sure to check it out.

Additionally, there is a MySQL BoF session scheduled for Thursday evening from 8pm to 9pm in room D135. We'll be providing pizza (and probably beer if we can get our hands on some). I will be there along with Arjen and likely Brian as well. We hope to have discussions with …

Similar to the useless use of cat award. The useless use of if award highlights code examples where people use the if function or ternary operator when the return of the expression does the exact same thing. I first noticed this with returning boolean values from php functions. To protect the innocent the winner of today’s award will remain anonymous.

<anonymous> to my knowledge, youll have to SUM(IF(your_field <> “”, 1, 0)) as total_non_empty

Ignoring that the whole query should be using where your_field != ” and group by the non if() way to write this is:

SUM(your_field <> ”)

These examples aren’t an award to a specific person since I’m digging them up from my memory. This pretty much applies to both C and PHP.

< ?php

function foo()

{

$str = 'foo';

return $str == 'foo' ? TRUE : FALSE;
}

?>

Can be …

Admittedly, this is way off topic for this blog, but the recently unveiled Tesla Roadster strikes me as an awesome feat of engineering.  They've married the ultra lightweight Lotus convertible chassis with a high performance electric motor & drive train along with a few thousand lithium ion batteries (the kind used in laptops) to deliver a politically correct and wicked cool electric sportscar. It gets Ferrari-like performance, goes 130 mph, runs on pennies per mile and has a range of 250 miles. Heck, it even has an ipod interface.  The only downside: it's going to costs close to $100K.  If it had luggage space, I might be able to rationalize it.  For the money-is-no-object crowd, this car will be unmatched.  But for the rest of the world, it will likely be …

I will be free for dinner on Tuesday evening, July 25th, and I’d love it if you’d join me! Watch this space for details, although the update will be Tuesday, likely late afternoon.

(and of course let everyone know I’ll be doing my “So you’ve inherited a MySQL instance on unix” workshop — how a beginner can find out info/security checklist for everyone — Wednesday at 4:30 pm.)

Starting MySQL 5.1 (1), we’re simplifying life when it comes to the number of builds for each platform. We will be building only one binary package for each platform (2): the binary known in MySQL 5.0 as “max”. The assumption is that users prefer one binary with all options enabled, rather than having to choose the proper version at install time (or worse still, rely on others having made the proper choice on their behalf).

And with only one version, there is no need to call it “max”. “The max version is dead. Long live the max version!“. Not to speak in riddles, the standard mysqld binary is intended to contain all mysqld-max features. While 5.1.11 e.g. in Linux (x86) package still has three binaries

mysql-5.1.11-beta-linux-i686/bin/mysqld
mysql-5.1.11-beta-linux-i686/bin/mysqld-debug
mysql-5.1.11-beta-linux-i686/bin/mysqld-max

the plan is to reduce this to two. …

Earlier this week I released the revamped Connector/NET documentation. This is part of the wider Connectors chapter rework, which I’m currently finishing by doing the Connector/J and Connector/MXJ documentation.

Connector/NET provides a full ADO.NET compatible interface to MySQL and is compatible both the Windows .NET and Mono installations.

read more