You're probably all aware of my opinion regarding software patents... apart from all the other arguments against, purely looking at "time to market" and effective use of limited resources, it makes no business sense spendingwasting time on software patents. Just be faster.

I heard the following recently, and I think it's an interesting observation:An IP lawyer recently remarked that the most money that an engineer can earn is in patent litigation. When we take our best and brightest and put them to work litigating against the rest of the best and brightest, we shouldn't be surprised when we get passed by countries that actually make things.The real question may well be: what business are you in? Producing something real, or just creating more work and income for lawyers?

This may even apply to some innovations outside the software realm. Increasingly, time to market is critical - even if your innovation gets …

If you don't know anything about Jim Starkey read this, this and this. He's coming to speak tonight at the Boston MySQL meetup.

Looks like it's going to be well attended. I'll have the video posted as soon as humanly possible.

Update: video and podcast now available

It seems like only yesterday that Jeremy Cole came to Yahoo! to take the job I vacated to join the Yahoo! Search team.

Well, he's out on his own now and we need some serious MySQL geekage around here.

The official job description looks like this:

Yahoo!'s Platform Engineering group is looking for a MySQL expert to provide consulting, training, and internal support for MySQL and data storage technologies. You will be working with teams to help them understand how MySQL may fit into their applications, making internal releases of custom MySQL binaries from source, analyzing database performance, and helping others to tune their hardware and software settings.

An ideal candidate has designed …

I got a quite a few encouraging comments in response to my previous blog entry, Some thoughts on Pentaho and MySQL. Now let's see if I can turn all this talk about Pentaho and MySQL into something we can touch and look at.

I want to make a start in creating a bundle of MySQL centric Pentaho samples. The idea is to end up with at least one simple educational sample to for each of the main flavours of functionality offered by pentaho.

Pentaho
As far as Pentaho is concerned: I'm taking the preconfigured demo environment as a basis for a couple of reasons:

• 
  
• Right now I'm not really interested in getting lost in the intricacies of setting up a J2EE server. There's plenty of time for that later on
  
• As an extension to my first point, the …

Recently we have been asked to develop some of our future sites in PHP. Traditionally we have worked in an in house language which fits in nicely with HTML but there is pressure from our clients to use something a little more "available" so that they can customise their sites themselves.

The in house language connects to Oracle and we have a large library of Oracle Packages designed to get our information from the database in a structured way. One thing we do a lot is return data in collections rather than via ref cursors. The problem is that the current version of the Oracle Call Interface doesn't support returning arrays (collections) which have been defined within the header of a package.

This means either rewriting some 500 packages/procedures or adding another layer of complexity to convert the returns into a data type PHP can handle.

SearchOracle has published an interview with Forrester Research open source analyst Noel Yuhanna on Oracle's open source strategy and the impact of open source on the database market.  Both Noel Yuhanna and Michael Gould from Forrester have published new reports on open source technology.  Forrester has been one of the earliest advocates of open source, encouraging corporate customers to develop adoption strategies that make fit with their environment. 

Q. What do you make of Oracle's recent moves in the open source market?

Yuhanna: Open source databases are certainly …

With due apologies for the late warning to those not signed up on the Danish User Group mailing list: At the end of the week last week, some of us got together and planned a first, informal meet-up in Copenhagen. The date is tomorrow, Tuesday July 11, the time is 19:00, and the place is Café Castro on Nørrebrogade 209, Copenhagen.

See you there!

… thanks to Bogomil (”Bogo”) Shopov, who was the one to push us into making this happen

Meetings

Finally, Bulgarian MySQL user group is alive. Thanks to MySQL AB we are in the meetup.com site. Our website will be ready within 2 weeks. Our fist UG meeting will be at Aug 7 in Sofia. Everyone are invited to join the group and meeting.

Just a reminder, the Danish UG will have a meting tomorrow at 19.00 in Copenhagen.

Community

I am starting a white paper on communities and relation between technologies and communities. One of the chapters will be ‘Why the MySQL community is so strong’ and i will be very happy to know your opinion. I know that answer, do you?

As I explained in my previous blog entry, EU internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy is going to announce pretty soon that he wants to help to get the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) ratified. The EPLA is a new attempt to make software and business method patents more enforceable in Europe, and beyond that effect, it would generally encourage certain types of patent holders to litigate.

But there’s a technical problem (”technical” in terms of “legally technical”): The European Commission’s legal services say the EPLA is a so-called “mixed agreement” that the member states of the EU cannot conclude on their own: they need the EU involved. To be very precise, it’s not the EU (European Union), but the EC (European Community, formerly called European Economic Community) that has to do this. However, for the …