MySQL — or, as I was frequently instructed, you spell it My-Ess-Que-Ell?...

Something everybody learns when starting at MySQL — though few as forcefully as I learned, when staying my first few weeks with Monty.

Ok, so I'm no spring chick anymore... it took me two weeks to learn the mantra, and now I have been assimilated.
But, look at it from the lighter perspective — if that was the hardest part — then the rest is really easy.

If you can handle more Monty stories, check out the interview:
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/taneli-otala-mysql.html

But, what I really want to write about in this blog is about databases, or data management — future trends, how to make some entirely new and efficient applicatiions without changing too much. It's all about …

MySQL — or, as I was frequently instructed, you spell it My-Ess-Que-Ell?...

Something everybody learns when starting at MySQL — though few as forcefully as I learned, when staying my first few weeks with Monty.

Ok, so I'm no spring chick anymore... it took me two weeks to learn the mantra, and now I have been assimilated.
But, look at it from the lighter perspective — if that was the hardest part — then the rest is really easy.

If you can handle more Monty stories, check out the interview:
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/taneli-otala-mysql.html

But, what I really want to write about in this blog is about databases, or data management — future trends, how to make some entirely new and efficient applicatiions without changing too much. It's all about …

Greg Stein, chair of the Apache Software Foundation, and an employee at Google, working on open source projects, gave a very informative and compelling talk this morning comparing the various open source (and commercial) licensing schemes and the development model of both the Apache Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation.

Some of the main points of Greg's talk were that:

• The Apache Foundation manages a community, not code.
• The trend towards commoditization in the software industry will push most software licenses towards non-copyleft licenses (more in a later post)
• A community will grow only when it is given the freedom to grow, and part of this freedom is the ability to commit code to the project

As for Apache managing a community, and not code, Greg is saying, quite rightly, that the value of the Apache Software Foundation is not in the combined quality of the project's code, but in …

To start with the Postgresql talk , I ran in just too late as the slides about slony were just finished :(

Skipped out on Nigel's Talk, after not having time to play with the OpenPower at the office I`m assuming that Macbar knows enough about it already , Then the awkard break before your own talk it's the waiting and the people dropping in one by one , It's much easier to start directly after someone else :) Ray introduced my talk as "The talk you have all been waiting for" , hmm.. he shouldn't have done that. It made me fall back into my old bad habit of speeding trough my slides in just about 35 minutes rather than the scheduled 45 I had.

I'm starting to hear myselve thinking during a talk that I gave before "Hmm.. I've already said this" then realising 2 slides later that I actually didn't say that yet during that talk but during a previous one. That really might have confused people. I really have to work on my presentation …

I just received a copy of Alex Davies and Harrison Fisk’s book MySQL Clustering (us; uk).

I had the honor of reading a few of the chapters before they were published, and this looks to be a really excellent hands-on guide for setting up your own clusters. It takes you all the way from a thorough understanding of the types of nodes that make up a cluster, hardware requirements and initial setup through security and management to tuning and troubleshooting.

This is good …

Like I said yesterday I downloaded the IDE and played with it a bit. Note that its quite a hefty download if you go with the "all-in-one" package (so pick your mirror wisely!). But I kinda like software that you just unzip and go.

The highlighting is nicely done. The interface looks nice, although there are way too many buttons that I do not know what they do (and I assume a lot of them will never be relevant for a PHP developer).

The same goes for the settings. I looked them through a couple times but did not find such basics things as being able to show all characters including whitespace (I have become so used to this that I just cannot read code without seeing the whitespace) or changing tabs to become 4 spaces (you can set the tab width though). The #eclipse channel also seems to suffer from a huge imbalance of questions to answers.

I should probably get …

Nick Halsey and I shared lunch at Novell's BrainShare conference yesterday, and fell to talking about the benefits inherent in an open source business model, real and imagined. One cherished benefit? Significant savings in sales and marketing costs. (Larry Augustin drove this point home at OSBC 2005, and John Roberts preaches this gospel frequently, in his OSBC 2006 keynote and elsewhere. I've said it, too.

Question: Is it true?

It's certainly true of open source companies at a certain stage in their existence. Alfresco, today, manages to sign marquee customers without stepping …

I've always been interested in refactoring code, but one thing that is always a little harder is refactoring databases... there isn't enough documentation available on it.

I was quite excited to see a new book published this month. I've started reading it through my Safari subscription.

I've inherited a fair bit of bad code in the past. Sometimes you can see that things don't work, but you don't know what to fix. The refactoring process is all about 'smells'. A smell is a particular design pattern that might have been a bad choice.

I'm particularly fond of this 'smells' term (commonly appearing refactoring books). It makes me think of food; if it smells, it's probably bad, or rotting. That's not *always* true though, …