Recently we have been asked to develop some of our future sites in PHP. Traditionally we have worked in an in house language which fits in nicely with HTML but there is pressure from our clients to use something a little more "available" so that they can customise their sites themselves.

The in house language connects to Oracle and we have a large library of Oracle Packages designed to get our information from the database in a structured way. One thing we do a lot is return data in collections rather than via ref cursors. The problem is that the current version of the Oracle Call Interface doesn't support returning arrays (collections) which have been defined within the header of a package.

This means either rewriting some 500 packages/procedures or adding another layer of complexity to convert the returns into a data type PHP can handle.

SearchOracle has published an interview with Forrester Research open source analyst Noel Yuhanna on Oracle's open source strategy and the impact of open source on the database market.  Both Noel Yuhanna and Michael Gould from Forrester have published new reports on open source technology.  Forrester has been one of the earliest advocates of open source, encouraging corporate customers to develop adoption strategies that make fit with their environment. 

Q. What do you make of Oracle's recent moves in the open source market?

Yuhanna: Open source databases are certainly …

With due apologies for the late warning to those not signed up on the Danish User Group mailing list: At the end of the week last week, some of us got together and planned a first, informal meet-up in Copenhagen. The date is tomorrow, Tuesday July 11, the time is 19:00, and the place is Café Castro on Nørrebrogade 209, Copenhagen.

See you there!

… thanks to Bogomil (”Bogo”) Shopov, who was the one to push us into making this happen

Meetings

Finally, Bulgarian MySQL user group is alive. Thanks to MySQL AB we are in the meetup.com site. Our website will be ready within 2 weeks. Our fist UG meeting will be at Aug 7 in Sofia. Everyone are invited to join the group and meeting.

Just a reminder, the Danish UG will have a meting tomorrow at 19.00 in Copenhagen.

Community

I am starting a white paper on communities and relation between technologies and communities. One of the chapters will be ‘Why the MySQL community is so strong’ and i will be very happy to know your opinion. I know that answer, do you?

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.