For all of the innovation that occurs in today's technology marketplace, the most commonly used business applications-those associated with Microsoft Office -- remain stale and hackneyed. While we wait for Microsoft to come out with a new version of Office that overshoots user need while ensuring that consumers, businesses and government remain locked into Microsoft specific standards, I put forth the notion that an open source business productivity suite has the rare opportunity to dislodge Microsoft's stronghold on the desktop - it just needs a little help from the community.

The Ultimate Battleground?
We are on the cusp of a unique time in the Microsoft product lifecycle. Both Office 12 and Windows Vista loom on the horizon and IT shops and end-users around the world will have to decide just how much extra they are willing to pay (again) for applications like Powerpoint and Access, and how much they plan to use InfoPath and …

I'm using DBDesigner 4 quite a lot. I think the successor, MySQL Workbench, is very promising, but it does not meet my requirements (yet).

Having DBDesigner Generate SQL
Those that've worked with DBDesigner have probably noticed the particular strategy it uses to generate SQL code from the model. First of all, the user needs to specify what kind of SQL script is to be generated: a DROP, CREATE or optimization script. Then, DBDesigner does it's thing. In case of a DROP or CREATE script, exactly one statement is generated for each table in the diagram (or in the current selection if you choose to).

In case of the CREATE script, each CREATE TABLE statement contains not only the column …

I looked through the results of the 2006 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards and was very happy to see that phpMyAdmin came out first in the Database and SysAdmin categories. Congratulations to Marc Delisle and the rest of the phpMyAdmin team!

phpMyAdmin will actually be showcasing their project in the DotOrg Pavilion at our MySQL Users Conference, taking place April 24-27 in Santa Clara, California. One more reason to not miss this event!

Today I was at the OSS Forum day in Hobart, really interesting. I was honoured to do the opening keynote, which I think was very well received. I met and talked with many good people. There's a lot going on here. Excellent.

This evening talked at the local Linux users group (TasLUG) about MySQL 5.1, which drew a fairly big crowd and we covered some very good and in-depth questions! Oh and the pub had good food, too...

From there, I went on a little two-hour roadtrip North and am now writing this from a hotel room in Launceston. The hotel is charging me an exorbitant amount of money to pick up some email on my laptop, about $0.50 cents per minute and it has just notified me that I actually reached some limit so it's now charging $0.20 per additional MB. Just great.

But, Launceston. I'll be speaking at the local TAFE (colleges …

LinuxWorld's Golden Penguin Bowl was a tight race, but in the end the MySQL nerds nailed a few critical questions to pull ahead and win. My favorite question was a quote about the MIT $100 laptop saying (essentially) that nobody in their right mind would want to use one of those slow, cheap, hand-cranked things. Neither MySQL or Oracle folks guessed that it was Bill Gates.

The Golden Pengin is quite a piece of art in itself, hefty large glass sculpture that is quite a thing to lug around. Jay got lots of strange looks coming home on the subway, and when my kids saw it the next morning they were shure it was some kind of glass rocket with a bent tip. Can't find a photo for reference in Google, if I get a chance to get a photo of it will post.

The photo (the best from a selection of pretty crappy shots) is of Brian Aker, Jay Pipes and Ted Ts'o singing a selection from an old IBM company songbook.

The next Boston MySQL meetup is just around the corner, Monday April 10th.

Jay Pipes is sticking around for a few days after Linux World to present this session, which was given as a webinar back in March and was the 2nd best attended webinar in the history of MySQL webinars. It's also a preview of Jay's performance talk at the MySQL Users Conference. Jay really knows his stuff when it comes to the inner workings of MySQL, you don't want to miss this:

Learn where to best focus your attention when tuning the performance of your applications and database servers, and how to effectively find the "low hanging fruit" on the tree of bottlenecks. It's not rocket science, but with a bit of acquired skill and experience, and of course good habits, you too can do this …

Just got back from the MySQL DevCon in Sorrento, Italy, followed by a fortnight's working holiday in Bangkok. The day before I left Italy, I received a 5AM call advising me that someone had broken into the house (again). My useless sod of a rental agent was reported to have said, "If he thought he might get broken into, he oughtn't have gone overseas." WTF? I was supposed to ring up our CEO and tell him, "Hey, Mårten, you don't mind pushing back the conference about six months until Yong Property Management (pathetically negligent) decide to pull their finger out and do something about the shoddy locks on the windows and doors of that piece of crap I pay them $300 a fortnight for, do you?" Right! Those losers couldn't even be bothered to come secure the door after the fact. If it'd not been for my yard guy and my housekeeper taking matters into their own hands and doing something about my back door having the glass bashed out of it and gaily …

Just got back from the MySQL DevCon in Sorrento, Italy, followed by a fortnight's working holiday in Bangkok. The day before I left Italy, I received a 5AM call advising me that someone had broken into the house (again). My useless sod of a rental agent was reported to have said, "If he thought he might get broken into, he oughtn't have gone overseas." WTF? I was supposed to ring up our CEO and tell him, "Hey, Mårten, you don't mind pushing back the conference about six months until Yong Property Management (pathetically negligent) decide to pull their finger out and do something about the shoddy locks on the windows and doors of that piece of crap I pay them $300 a fortnight for, do you?" Right! Those losers couldn't even be bothered to come secure the door after the fact. If it'd not been for my yard guy and my housekeeper taking matters into their own hands and doing something about my back door having the glass bashed out of it and gaily …

Why when running doxygen over the mysql tree (5.0 or 5.1) do I have a process with 590MB of RSS memory?

Not exactly inspiring confidence. Although I guess I’m lucky because I have the RAM to do that in (on any box around here I actually use frequently).

The output of doxygen can be really useful when trying to learn (or remember) the relationships between various bits of code. I find it a bit faster than switching between buffers in an editor and then trying to remember where some class was defined. links are a good thing.

It’d be great if we switched all our public API docs to doxygen, as the output really is quite nice. In fact, internal APIs wouldn’t be bad either. Although, naturally, the real documentation is the source, which (luckily) the doxygen output also makes easy to view.

I’ve rigged up this script to automatically pull the latest out of the public repository (using the free …

So before I launch ~40 benchmarks across six identical (plus one not identical) machines running on different RAID setups, I have to ask something...

Does anyone just know the best BIOS/RAID/kernel/scheduler/MySQL 5.0 options for SMP x86_64 hosts running large amounts of memory (8G+) doing lots of varied writes/reads with 95% InnoDB data? Willing to share? :)

I have a pretty good idea of the BIOS/scheduler/MySQL options, probably kernel, less so on the RAID front. I have LSI megaraid U320-1LP's with 64 megs of cache with battery backup. Six drives per machine, not bothering with hotspare. Will have coldspares around.

Also, fun shit: In at least 2.6.15.7 and 2.6.16.1, if you have all of the adaptec drivers *and* new LSI drivers compiled into your kernel, and have the same LSI megaraid cards that I do, weird shit happens. 9/10 times during boot megaraid_mailbox will fail to probe the hardware all the way, …