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 …

eWeek Labs ran an extensive "stack" test pitting various Windows and Linux stacks. The results show that the opportunity for open source apps is probably larger then most of have realized. The results also show that there are use cases to support both sides. Let the battle rage on.

eWEEK Labs Bakeoff: Linux Versus .Net Stacks
Based on our forays into user forums for many top open-source enterprise applications, there are many IT managers attempting to run open-source products on Windows servers-attracted, no doubt, to the benefits and efficiencies of using open source without having to become Linux administrators.

The results of our WAMP stack tests indicate that these folks might be on to something. Our WAMP stack setups included …

MySQL AB today announced the appointment of Paul Weinstein as executive vice president of business development, and Clint Smith as vice president and general counsel. Both executives will be based in the companyâ??s newly-relocated Silicon Valley business headquarters in Cupertino, California.

In this article we explore how to program foreign keys into a MySQL Server. This is important when your application requires referential integrity and the storage engine you?d like to use, as in the case of MyISAM or NDB (Cluster), does not support this functionality natively. We should note that InnoDB and the upcoming code-named ?Falcon? storage engine, both support foreign keys.

"My code is all in version control," Joe said proudly. "Everything is versioned. I'll never lose any work." But then he lost some "other" code he didn't realize was critical. This article is about how to find and safeguard all the hidden code you don't know your business relies on.

Superficially, it appears that the European Commission is going to evaluate the 2,500+ replies it received to its January 2006 questionnaire on patent policy as well as the input it will receive at this coming Wednesday’s (July 12) hearing prior to deciding how to move forward in the area of patent policy.

However, it would be naive to believe there is even the smallest doubt as to what EU internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy intends to do. He has decided on that a long time ago, at least a number of months, possibly as early as last fall.

McCreevy has a new game plan after his failure to push the software patent directive through last year. That directive was not his baby originally: it was part of his predecessor …

Last time we looked at how to connect to MySQL Cluster using the NDBAPI. This time we will look into how to implement simple primary key operations.
First of all we need a table to operate on. Connect a mysql client to the MySQL server:
> mysql -u root
and create the following table in the test database:

create table t1 ( a integer primary key, b integer, c char(20)) engine=ndb;

Insert some data into it:

insert into t1 values(1, 1, 'hello');
insert into t1 values(2, 2, 'hello again');

On this table we then want to issue the query:

SELECT b,c FROM t1 WHERE a=1;

expressed in the NDBAPI.


Before we start...

With Ndb_cluster_connection that we discussed in the last example, we were able to connect to MySQL Cluster.
However, we have not yet connected to a database. This service is provided …

Yesterday I published the text of the short speech I’m going to give at the European Commission’s patent policy hearing on Wednesday (July 12). I think I should explain to the non-politicos among you what the term “hearing” means in this context.

Governments, quasi-governmental bodies (which is how I’d describe the European Commission, non-judgmentally) and legislators (for the most part, that means parliaments or subsets of a parliament, such as a committee or a party) frequently conduct hearings. At a hearing on a particular topic (in this case, patent policy), politicians and their staffs listen to people who are, personally or professionally, affected by a future decision. Obviously they can’t invite everyone who is or feels …

Three weeks have gone by since the presentation of the "Business Intelligence with MySQL and Pentaho" webinar.

People that have been reading this blog will probably know how enthusiastic I am about Pentaho, even before I joined MySQL. Any effort that helps these superb products go together "...like peas and carrots..." is certainly something I like to contribute to as much as I can.

MySQL has been supporting features that make it extraordinarily useful in reporting / datawarehousing environments for quite a long time, and one of the major features of the upcoming 5.1 release, partitioning will probably not be …

I'm not sure what it is, but Silicon Valley so desperately wants to be the center of everything, that sometimes it has to resort to myths to keep itself there. Where? Exactly. That's the question. It's a question I didn't think could be all that controversial when I said it at OSBC London, but now that it has been slashdotted, I guess it's officially a Big Deal. For 3.5 seconds.

Dana had a good response to my post about Europe remaining the center of open source. Now a few others have jumped on the bandwagon, and their critiques aren't quite as salient.

Matthew Aslett tries (and fails, though he never claimed his method was perfect) to illustrate on a map …