A few days ago I had a series of meetings in the European Parliament, and I heard that Microsoft and SAP are already lobbying politicians to support the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA).

There are still three days left to answer the European Commission’s patent policy questionnaire, but it’s a foregone conclusion that the pro-software patent camp wants the EPLA more than anything else.

Let’s forget about the community patent for the time being. Yes, officially it’s the priority of the EU, but it isn’t going to happen anytime soon. There is too much resistance against it. The FFII and I will keep an eye on developments concerning the community patent, and you’ll hear from us if anything important happens on that front, but my recommendation is that most of us take it off the radar screen.

European Patent Litigation …

The SQL standard specifies two different intelligent variants of the JOIN syntax: the natural join and the named columns join:

<natural join> ::=
    <table reference> NATURAL [ <join type> ] JOIN <table factor>

<named columns join> ::= 
    USING <left paren> <join column list> <right paren>

(from ISO/IEC 9075-2:2003; 7.7 <joined table>)

I call these two forms of the join syntax intelligent because they imply a non-trivial join condition. This means that such a join operation will relate the records from the two tables expressions based on some criterion without requiring that the criterion is specified in each and every detail. This is unlike the other variants of the JOIN syntax: to be meaningful, these require that the join condition in the form of a boolean …

This seems to be a popular problem, since I saw it twice in the past few weeks in two different newsgroups. Somebody complains that, having query with a set of keys like this

SELECT * from mytable where id IN (200, 2 ,100)

they get the results in a order that ius different from the one they specified. For example, they may get something like

select
  *
from
  main_table
where
  id in (200,2,100);
+-----+----------+
| id  | contents |
+-----+----------+
| 2   | b        |
| 100 | aa       |
| 200 | bb       |
+-----+----------+

One of the posters complained that the result should come in the specified order [200,2,100], and that MySQL was arbitrarily sorting its resultset.
When I see such requests, I usually explain that there are two misconceptions. The first being that MySQL sorts results without asking. That it does not …

I have been invited to join the O'Reilly weblogs on databases.
Today I gave my first contribution, with a piece on dumping MySQL information schema contents.

A few days ago, I tried to use an opensource mailing list manager program, it had great reviews and seemed to have the features I wanted. So, I tried it out, to my dismay just the installer alone had issues, when I went to the install page (thank you for making one in the first place), I was presented with lots and lots of PHP on screen..obviously, I was confused, this is PHPcult.com after all, and the server is configured to parse .php, .php3, .inc. So, I had to do some digging as to what was causing the problem.. the programmers used short open tags for PHP. So, I thought, I need to make a list of things that people do, that may come and bite them later on down the road. Here goes:

• Register Globals : This has been discussed more than it should be, it’s a simple concept, just take it from the more experienced programmers, this is bad.
• Short Open Tags: This is when you use …

I'll be giving my "usual" PDO talk at both MySQL Users Conference 2006 and OSCON 2006 (the MySQLUC version of the talk will have a MySQL focus).

If you're interested in PDO and haven't had the opportunity to see me give this talk yet, please consider trying to get to one of these conferences. My talk covers the design decisions behind PDO, suggests some best practices for using it, highlights portability concerns (particularly because PHP programmers have been "dummied down" by the older mysql client library API) and more.

As usual, I'm always open for questions during the talk (I'm there for your benefit after all) and I try to make myself more generally available during the conference, so if you want to ask me questions, or even just have a chat, then feel free to approach me.

A few days ago, I tried to use an opensource mailing list manager program, it had great reviews and seemed to have the features I wanted. So, I tried it out, to my dismay just the installer alone had issues, when I went to the install page (thank you for making one in the first place), I was presented with lots and lots of PHP on screen..obviously, I was confused, this is PHPcult.com after all, and the server is configured to parse .php, .php3, .inc. So, I had to do some digging as to what was causing the problem.. the programmers used short open tags for PHP. So, I thought, I need to make a list of things that people do, that may come and bite them later on down the road. Here goes:

• 
  
• Register Globals : This has been discussed more than it should be, it's a simple concept, just take it from the more experienced programmers, this is bad.
  
  
• Short Open …

Today, I updated my development tree installation of MySQL 5.1 (which is already at 5.1.10-beta) and tested Event Scheduling again. In MySQL 5.1.7 there were still a lot of rough edges, but now a lot is much smoother.

Take for example this event:

DELIMITER //


DROP EVENT IF EXISTS copyGeneralLog //


CREATE EVENT copyGeneralLog
ON SCHEDULE EVERY 1 MINUTE
STARTS '2006-04-08 01:44:00'
ENDS '2006-04-08 01:50:00'
ON COMPLETION PRESERVE
ENABLE DO
BEGIN
  INSERT INTO test.general_log
    (event_time, user_host, thread_id, server_id,
     command_type, argument)
  SELECT event_time, user_host, thread_id, server_id,
         command_type, argument
    FROM general_log
    WHERE command_type='Connect';


  TRUNCATE TABLE general_log;


  SELECT 1, 2, 3;
END //


DELIMITER ;

In 5.1.7, it was not guaranteed that …

If you have been reading my previous entries the answer you will think is ‘not bloody well’.

After about 3 days of tuning we doubled the throughput, and got a much nicer picture, outperforming a x86-64 machine by 2.5 times in one case.

Thanks to Luojia Chen (Jenny) from Sun, Peter Zaitsev from Mysql, and Colm MacCárthaigh & Mads Toftum from the ASF.

oh.. the benchmark.. I nearly forgot ;-)

(Oh people..please link to the blog entry, and not the paper itself.. Thanks)

update: people were having issues downloading the PDF. so I placed a mirror of it here

JBoss is going to get bought.

It's no secret that Oracle wasn't the only one sniffing after JBoss. Red Hat has talked about buying JBoss (though it's hard to see Matthew and Marc getting along well :-), as has IBM.

But Novell is the best fit.

Disagree? You think JBoss + Novell = NoBoss? Think it doesn't make sense, or won't happen? I think you're wrong.

Why Novell? Let me count the ways...

1. Novell has lots of cash. Too much cash, comparatively. (See right.) Marc Fleury wants cash. (Who doesn't?) Perfect match.

2. Novell has struggled to convince enterprises to move from NetWare to Open Enterprise Server/SLES, though results have been improving under Ron Hovsepian. Still, the needs something else to attract and hook would-be customers. …