LinuxWorld Expo in Boston last week featured a number of better than average keynotes and panel sessions.  The best one I saw was one called "Is Linux Killing the Enterprise Software Model?"  The panel was moderated by Larry Augustin and featured open source CEOs Marten Mickos (MySQL), Marc Fleury (JBoss), John Roberts (SugarCRM) and Peter Levine(XenSource).

Overall the panel was good.  Marc Fleury was his usual lively self, slamming IBM and old school enterprise software companies.  Marten Mickos was the elder statesman of the panel, providing a good perspective on balancing the needs of enterprise customers and the open source community.   Other good points made:

• Open source software must be easy to consume
…

Kursziele:

Der Workshop macht Sie fit für die Entwicklung von Webapplikationen auf Basis von PHP 5 und IBM DB2. Die Themen Objektorientierung, PDO und ibm_db2 stehen dabei im Vordergrund. Dabei zeigt der Kurs die neuen Möglichkeiten, die durch die ibm_db2 Extension realisierbar sind.
Zum Abschluss wird im Team eine kleine Anwendung auf Basis von PHP 5 und IBM DB2 entwickelt.

Inhalt:

• Sprachreferenz PHP
• Objektorientiertes Programmieren mit PHP 5
• Sichtbarkeit, Exceptions und Iteratoren
• PHP und Datenbanken
• Vorstellung von SQLIte, MySQLi und PDO
• IBM DB2 und PHP
• Funktionsumfang der ibm_db2 Extension
• Entwicklung einer eigenen Anwendung

Start: 30.05.2006 10.00 Uhr
Ende: 31.05.2006 17.00 Uhr
Dauer: 2 Tage
Ort: IBM Düsseldorf - PSC - Raum Lippe
…

Digging around the MySQL 5.0 SQL mode docs tonight and see this option:

NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION - Prevents automatic substitution of the default storage engine when a statement such as CREATE TABLE specifies a storage engine that is disabled or not compiled in. (Implemented in MySQL 5.0.8)

Where was that when I needed it?

Back when I switched data storage from the MyISAM to InnoDB storage engine we got burned by not having this option. I had enabled InnoDB on the development box to allow the programmers to start using foreign keys in their database schemas. There was a disconnect on pushing the new functionality up to the testing environment and it went up before InnoDB was enabled on the test database. Unfortunately none of the developers who were pushing the DDL statements up to testing noticed that InnoDB wasn't enabled because …

The Melbourne MySQL User Group April Meetup

Should be fun! I’m going to talk about Cluster.

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.