ActiveGrid CEO Peter Yared is back again -- this time with some analysis of different types of big company reactions to open source.

Open source has definitely challenged the business models of existing infrastructure software players. Following is an ontology of different types of big company reactions to open source, and an example of each type of behavior pattern.

Join the Party - IBM
"Join the Party" open source players contribute extensively to existing open source projects, even those that are competing with their proprietary products. IBM has regularly made major contributions to open source technologies that compete with their own products. Examples include IBM's support of Linux, which competes with their AIX UNIX operating system, and Geronimo and PHP, which compete with its WebSphere business. IBM is clearly the most sophisticated large player in the open …

I now work for MySQL full time without the strings. I've learnt a lot, It really has been the best job I've ever had.

MySQL officially announced release 5.0.22 today (the release notes in the manual were not yet updated to reflect this at the time of writing, they might be when you read this). It's a security fix release only, based on the previous 5.0.21 release. So be careful if you're currently running a preview release of what was tagged 5.0.22 before, this has now become 5.0.23. So you will lose some of the functionality or bug fixes by switching from a 5.0.22 preview to the final 5.0.22 release (it's not an update but sort of a crossdate).

The right way of handling the situation therefore is:

• If you're currently running 5.0.21: Update to 5.0.22 to get the security fix for the SQL-injection hole in the multibyte encoding processing.
• If you're currently running a 5.0.22 preview …

OK, so I am a late adopter. Flickr is a great place that any photographer should be aware of. And not just be aware of, but posting in.

So it shouldn’t be a big surprise to me that half of PlanetMySQL.org bloggers have Flickr accounts. After posting my initial photo sets I registered my first few contacts. By looking at my contacts’ contacts, you’ll likely find most any photographically active MySQL blogger.

There’s a lot to learn and to use (what’s the difference between a friend and a contact? does it matter? will friends merely labelled as contacts be …

I had a nice dinner with Monty Widenius, co-founder of MySQL the other night.  Monty is an excellent cook and he prepared a nice meal for the team that has been working at his house in Finland the past few days.  It was nice to spend time with everyone and drill into some of the interesting new development that's taking place.  We also talked about ways we can improve our processes, code quality, QA and cooking.  I recorded some of the discussions and will try to transcribe it into an interview on the developer zone. 

Update: The interview is now posted.

• MySQL: …

Don't forget to register for ApacheCon Europe before June 6 to receive the early bird discount. This is also when the conference organizers decide which tutorials to keep, so don't wait until the last minute to sign up for your favorites, else you might be disappointed to find out that they're no longer available.

The discounts are pretty good - 349 euros for a full-day of tutorials. (309 if you send three or more people.) Speaking of tutorials, there are some good ones to choose from, and OmniTI is well represented:

• Monday, Advanced Production Troubleshooting Techniques by Theo Schlossnagle …

While the majority of the really serious and crashing bugs are fixed right now in MySQL 5.0, there are still a lot of bugs that only surface in some very specific queries. One area that seems to be more heavily affected in particular are VIEWs.

To keep track of the ongoing progress I just compiled a list of my VIEW bugs that have just been fixed with the current releases or are probably going to be fixed in one of the next. Interestingly, I hit five of them (#19077, #19089, #19111, #19114, #19714) with just one single set of nested VIEWs. I bet you believe me, that it took me some time to figure out why my final query just wouldn't return the result I expected.

Bug #15950 (no schedule for fix available yet)

Functions returning the current date or time (such as NOW()) get optimized …

As part of the partitioning development in MySQL 5.1 we've added the ability to
check which partitions of a table that is actually accessed in a particular query.
As partitions in a sense can be a sort of index this is an important feature to
help understand performance impact of a query.

The method to use this feature is the normal EXPLAIN command with an
added keyword PARTITIONS. So e.g.
EXPLAIN PARTITIONS select * from t1;

So a slightly more useful example would be
CREATE TABLE t1 (a int)
PARTITION BY RANGE (a)
(PARTITION p0 VALUES LESS THAN (10),
PARTITION p1 VALUES LESS THAN (20),
PARTITION p2 VALUES LESS THAN (30));

Now if we do an equal query we should only need to access one partition:
This will be verified by the command:
EXPLAIN PARTITIONS select * from t1 WHERE a = 1;
/* Result in p0 being displayed in the …

As part of the work in developing partitioning support for 5.1 a new
information schema table has been added. This table can be used to
retrieve information about properties of individual partitions.

To query this table you can issue a query like:
SELECT * FROM information_schema.partitions WHERE
table_schema = "database_name" AND table_name = "name_of_table";

The result of this particular query will be one record per partition in
the table with info about the properties of these partitions.

A query on a non-partitioned table will produce a similar output
although most fields will be NULL. The information_schema.partitions
table is not yet implemented for MySQL Cluster so for MySQL Cluster
tables the output will be all NULLs on the partition specific information.

Below follows a short description of the fields in this …