Marten Mickos was kind enough to ping me about my post on whether open source companies can exceed the $1 billion speed limit our (alleged) business models impose. With his permission, I've posted in some of his thoughts below, which are cogent and a bit more thoughtful than my off-the-cuff tirade. :-)

(Stephen O'Grady, btw, now has a great response to my (and others') critique of his original premise (that we're not going to see an open source company hit the $1 billion in sales mark any time soon). You should read it.)

Marten writes:

If you read " …

Looks like things continue without me at MySQL

From Stefan, the MySQL docs lead:

We’ve completely reworked the Connector/MXJ and Connector/J sections of the MySQL Reference Manual.

MySQL provides connectivity for client applications developed in the Java programming language via a JDBC driver, which is called MySQL Connector/J. It’s a JDBC-3.0 Type 4 driver, which means that is pure Java, implements version 3.0 of the JDBC specification, and communicates directly with the MySQL server using the MySQL protocol. Find the overhauled documentation here:

- MySQL 5.1: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/connector-j.html
- MySQL 5.0: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/connector-j.html
- MySQL 4.1: …

How timely. Baron Schwartz, community member and creator of InnoTop, a monitoring utility for InnoDB profiling/diagnostics, posted today about some crashes reported for InnoTop:

A couple of people have written in reporting innotop crashes. Unfortunately I don?t have access to enough variations of operating systems and MySQL versions to test everything myself, but if you?re able to help by sending me a bug report when innotop crashes, I?m willing to work on fixing it!...

First of all, kudos to Baron for his excellent work so far. But I think his post highlights something that we should be thinking about when designing the MySQL build farm: should MySQL-related community projects also be given some sort of platform in order to take advantage of enlisted farm clients? More than …

Kevin Burton, CTO of TailRank.com, approached me a few weeks ago about the possiblility of having a MySQL hackfest in a style similar to Barcamp's grassroots flavour. Kevin and I talked yesterday to hammer out a few first logistical questions, and have made a few preliminary decisions.

The dates we have picked for the MySQL camp will be November 10th through 12th (Friday through Sunday). We picked these dates partly because a number of key MySQL figures, including Monty and David, will be in the valley for a board meeting that week. I believe it is important to have at least a few MySQL developers who know the MySQL server code inside and out to be present at the camp to ease the (substantial) learning curve when investigating the server internals. Hopefully, Brian and a few other developers …

So, things are progressing at a fairly decent clip towards getting the groundwork for a MySQL build farm going. The Forge wiki Build Farm Initiative has been updated with various ideas (thanks, Ronald!) so please go vote for features you want to see in the farm, and let us know your ideas for the system. Also, I have started a new wiki page called Build Farm Inventory, which is simply a springboard page to get an inventory of hardware that community members are willing to enlist in the farm. I've started things off by adding one of my own boxes. If you're interested in participating in the endeavour, please feel free to add your own boxen to the list.

Secondly, I've been going through the documentation that Kristian Nielsen provided me about the internal pushbuild software …

In addition to our main MySQL Users Conference that took place in April, there will also be two small MySQL Conferences in Europe later this year. There will be presentations about our products and roadmaps as well as sessions about best practices and first-hand customer experiences. You will also get a chance to meet and talk with many MySQLers and share your thoughts and experiences. The conferences will take place in London, UK (Tuesday, October 17th) and in Munich, Germany (Thursday, October 19th). The conference program looks very interesting and there is an early bird discount, if you register before August 31st. So don't hesitate to register soon!

A couple of people have written in reporting innotop crashes. Unfortunately I don't have access to enough variations of operating systems and MySQL versions to test everything myself, but if you're able to help by sending me a bug report when innotop crashes, I'm willing to work on fixing it! I hope soon I'll have a much larger test suite, and am grateful for your help with that. This article explains what information I need to reproduce and debug crashes.

I've made several improvements to the innotop InnoDB and MySQL monitor, and it's ready to get from the download link on the original article.

A couple of people have written in reporting innotop crashes. Unfortunately I don’t have access to enough variations of operating systems and MySQL versions to test everything myself, but if you’re able to help by sending me a bug report when innotop crashes, I’m willing to work on fixing it! I hope soon I’ll have a much larger test suite, and am grateful for your help with that. This article explains what information I need to reproduce and debug crashes.

ruby has two modules for connecting to mysql. one is called mysql/ruby and is built in top of the standard libmysqlclient c library. the other is called ruby/mysql and is pure ruby. the problem with the latter is that it is a from-scratch implementation of the mysql network protocol, and the authentication handshake changed in mysql 4.1.

but here is a patch to add support for new-style mysql authentication to ruby/mysql. it should also deal with the other protocol changes that came along at the same time. it doesn?t do anything to expose server-side prepared statements.

it is only lightly tested. in particular, i haven?t tried to connect to a pre-4.1 version of the server. it should still work, …