This coming Wednesday (July 12), I am going to speak during the litigation part of the European Commission’s patent policy hearing in Brussels. The hearing marks the end of a consultation process that began in January when the Commission published a questionnaire, in reply to which I wrote a position paper. At the hearing I am going to deliver the following short speech:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Some of you may already know me as the founder of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign, but let me start by introducing myself a little more specifically. I’m an independent software …

Looks like a lot of interest was generated from the results of RightMedia's iSCSI benchmarking. Peter Zaitsev is curious about the environment of the benchmark. So here's all the gory details
MySQL version : 5.0.21
System : GenToo Linux, kernel version 2.6.16-gentoo-r2-1
Hardware : 4GB memory, 2 Dual Core AMD Opteron 275 chips
MySQL configuration file (abridged version):

[client]
port = 3306
socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

[mysqld]
basedir = /usr
datadir = /var/lib/mysql/data
port = 3306
pid-file = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid
log-error = /var/log/mysql/mysqld.err
socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
user = mysql
max_connections = 1024
table_cache = 128
thread_case_size = 32
…

right on schedule, i?m done with the pressing changes we wanted to make to the mysql bugs system. the most visible things (to non-mysql employees) are probably just the cleanup of the layout of the bug pages themselves, and the new public tagging interface. (with the requisite ajax-y goodness.)

under the hood, i?ve taken a machete to some of the more egregious bits of code. that?s not to say there isn?t a lot more that could be cleaned up, but it?s a start. now that i?ve cleaned up the bug reporting and editing forms, they?re ripe for merging.

based on the priorities set by the developement management team, i did less of the cleanup of the main bugs schema than i had originally planned, but things are in a state now that it should be easier to tackle those in the future.

my plan is to release this code publicly, but one of the things i need to do first …

SQL blind inserts are a common mistake, but they're easily avoided. This article explains what blind inserts are and how to avoid them, as well as dispelling a common misconception about how to avoid them.

Kris and I sat together last Tuesday to discuss the MySQL Community in Belgium. Apparently, there is not really something active their. So, it's about time to do something about that.

We organizing a user meeting at the X-Tend office in Kontich 29th of August 2006. This is a Tuesday, so no excuse not to coming around!

Thanks to Kris for opening the office for this. I hope I'll be able to entertain people with lots of chats!

Sign up here http://upcoming.org/event/90055.

Geert and I decided it was time for a MySQL Usergroup in Belgium , actually mainly a meeting so we set a date and I`m opening our office for the first meeting.

More info: First MySQL Usergroup Belgium at X-Tend (Tuesday, August 29, 2006)

activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. It's basically the OSS version of Basecamp, a tool I like but would love to customize. I have a developer installing activeCollab right now...it's all PHP/MySQL so should be straight ahead development.

Also today I saw Coghead, which offers a very interesting drag and drop project management as a hosted tool. Screenshots are available, but no demo...the website contains arguably the best marketing fluff/BS web copy I have read in a long time. I love when Web 2.0 empowers me.

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…

Hello,

Looks like Martin Skold's article on MySQL Cluster's implementation of ALTER TABLE is finally up.

Check it out at: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-cluster-50.html

Also, looks like the body of my last post on the NDB API documentation got truncated, here it is again...

In the event you missed the announcement on one of the MySQL distribution lists from Stephan...

As part of the effort of making MySQL Cluster a more mainstream product, it's been on our agenda for a very long time to rewrite the NDB API documentation so that it becomes usable by mere mortals. It took nearly three months to do this, because the new documentation is almost 300 pages long! The MySQL NDB API Guide covers two low-level APIs for writing applications that work with MySQL's NDB …

Brian Aker recently published good write up about using MySQL replication. The piece I find missing however is good description of warning about limits of this approach as well as things you need to watch out for. You can call me person with negative mind but I tend to think about limits as well. So what would be my list of limits and watch outs in this case ?

- Limited write scaling. As Brian writes this works best for read intensive envinronments. Write scaling however can be real problem. Not moderate increase of write ratio can dramatically reduce performance but you also need to watch out for slave being able to keep up at all. Remember writes to slave are serialized so if you master happens to be 8 core system with 20 hard drives you may be in trouble even if writes only consume 10% of resources as almost only one core and only one disk will be …

Igor is doing great work on moving forward the XML based database schema format originally developed by Manuel Lemos as part of Metabase that is used in MDB2_Schema. The idea is to add the ability to also handle UPDATE and DELETE statement next to the currently supported CREATE, DROP, ALTER and INSERT statements. This format is even supported by DBDesigner4 and the DatabaseSchema ez component. For the uninitiated if you: The idea behind this schema format is to make it possible to define a single database schema that can be used to create, alter and initialize databases in any number of RDBMS. For example currently MDB2_Schema supports MySQL, PostGreSQL, Oracle, SQLite, MS SQL Server, Interbase/Firebird.

While Igor and I were discussing things we discovered that we …