I learned something very important last night listening to Jim Starkey at the Boston MySQL meetup. It wasn't that Jim created the blob datatype on a scratch of paper while stuck in Colorado waiting out a snowstorm that had closed the Boston airport. It also wasn't that when he created the blob it was hard to sell it to the folks at DEC, and even after adoption they gave it a more sophisticated sounding name, "segmented strings".

No, the important thing I learned is that when Jim created the blob datatype it wasn't an acronym, it was a reference to the large jelly-like alien from the 1958 classic, The Blob. The BLOb (Binary Large Object) acronym was created later, much to Jim's dismay.

The history is nicely captured in …

By nat

I met with the Ning crew in mid-June, the week before Where 2.0. Many thanks to Gina, David, Diego and others for taking the time to walk me through everything. I went in thinking "they're a crappy PHP hosting environment" and came away (a) knowing what they are, and (b) impressed. Read on to learn what changed my mind ....

What They've Got

At the bottom level of Ning is a toolkit of Web 2.0 services (authentication, data store, tagging) made available through RESTian APIs. Anybody can use these, whether they use the rest of Ning or not. These are implemented in Java 5 (no J2EE), running on more than 20 Solaris boxes using virtualization with Solaris zones. Fast, and secure (no …

Yesterday I opened a group on Meetup to manage our first meeting in Belgium. This is in addition to our event on Upcoming.org. If you are attending, please use which ever website you like to RSVP.

Language is an issue in Belgium, but it shouldn't really. English will be used so all should be able to follow. If one has a question which he or she can only express in Dutch, French or German (don't forget Die German folks!).. we can manage! It's Belgium after all!

So, go here to sign up:
- http://mysql.meetup.com/148/
- http://upcoming.org/event/90055/

A few months ago, I was looking for people to work on the backup team. I no longer need anybody, but from time to time people who know me, notably from the FreeBSD project, asking what it's like working for MySQL. Many of the questions are of more general interest, so I'll put down some of the thoughts here.

What's working for MySQL like? The answer to that question depends on what you're used to. In my case, I've been working with the FreeBSD project for over ten years, and many of the people who ask me are also involved with BSD, so that's a good point to compare with.

On the other hand, others reading this may have no background in Open Source, so it's worth mentioning that aspect too.

There's a lot working with MySQL, of course, too much for a single installment. This is the first of a number of articles I plan on aspects of work at MySQL.

The office For …

I got asked (being a Java developer) about what was involved in creating an Eclipse Plugin for Mercurial. Well in true Google style, why invent when somebody probably already has. A quick check finds Mercurial Eclipse by VecTrace.

Now until last week, I’d never heard of Mercurial, so this is really an introduction to somebody that has no idea.

What is Mercurial?

Mercurial is a fast, lightweight Source Control Management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects.

Ok, so big deal, I use CVS. I also use Subversion (SVN) for my Apache contributions, and also for MySQL GUI products. Why do we need another Version Control Product? Mercurial is a Distributed Software Configuration Management Tool. …

Billetel, the IT subsidiary of FNAC Spectacles, France's largest entertainment ticketing company, has selected the MySQL open source database to run its new online ticket reservation system. Billetel selected MySQL for its scalability, reliability and performance to power the sale of over 12 million event tickets per year.

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 …