At noon today, the European Parliament will vote on a 67-item resolution concerning innovation policy. The proposed item 43 “calls on the Commission to ensure proper protection of intellectual property rights and to present as soon as possible a proposal for harmonisation and mutual recognition of patent laws in Member States […]“. While “mutual recognition of patent laws” is a term that can be interpreted in different ways, there is no doubt what the sponsor of this article, Mr. Klaus Heiner Lehne MEP (a German conservative), has in mind: the mutual recognition of national patents by the EU member states.

I recently received a copy of a memorandum that he sent to some of his MEP colleagues on November 29, 2005, entitled “Patent initiative for a new European patent law”. In the first part of the …

Alot of people ask me why Connector/Net does not allow converting of field values to various primitive types simply by calling the appropriate GetXXX methods on the datareader.  To better understand what they are asking, consider the case where you have a table with the first column of type int32.  For whatever reason, you've decided that you want that value to be in a long primitive.  So you do what seems logical and call GetInt64() on the reader object.  You are then greeted with an odd InvalidCast exception.  This seems strange considering that an int32 primitive can easily be cast to an int64 primitive simply by using the appropriate cast syntax.  Indeed this does seem odd until you understand what is going on under the hood.   When Connector/Net reads the resultset values off the wire, it parses that data into the appropriate primitives based on the field type reported by MySQL.  So INT columns are …

So far the MySQL Developer's Meeting is going well. Since I tend to run meetings I don't get a lot of time to just sit in a room and listen to what others are saying. I have heard good things about the "Future of Events" meeting and Peter Harvey I am told did an excellent job on the Doxygen talk. We have been talking to about moving to Doxygen for a couple of years and I believe there is finally some momentum to do it (though I did hear the typical "read the code" sorts of comments). Personally I sit on the fence about it, but I am happy to go either way.

There was clapping yesterday from one of the other rooms, so I should find out what talk that was.

So far I was happy with my group on refactorting our test case system. mysql-test is a pretty significant test case system and as far as looking around at what other open source projects do, I think we have one of the better ones. We came up with 16 points we should solve …

Here’s an easy way to add the latest headlines from PlanetMySQL to your sidebar (mind the wide lines):

<h2><a href=”http://www.planetmysql.org”>PlanetMySQL</a></h2><br />
<script language=”JavaScript” src=”http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2F
www.planetmysql.org%2Frss20.xml&num=5&targ=y&utf=y” type=”text/javascript”></script>

<noscript>
<a href=”http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2F
www.planetmysql.org%2Frss20.xml&num=5&targ=y&utf=y&html=y”>View RSS feed</a>
</noscript>

Yup, just paste that in and you are done.

OK, don't beat me up for talking about the UC again, but this is some cool stuff!

The Community team has been hard at work inviting open source foundations, organizations, and projects to the DotOrg pavilion at this year's MySQL Users Conference, and it looks like we're going to have a number of really interesting and key projects setting up shop at the Pavilion.

Jay, what the heck is the DotOrg Pavilion?

Hmmm, glad you asked. If any of you have attended other open source conferences, you've probably heard the term .ORG pavilion, or something similar, before. It's a place where non-commercial entities, projects, and key organizations and foundations involved in our beloved FOSS community get a chance to discuss the issues on top of their agendas and showcase key developments in their projects. As conference attendees, you should plan on spending time in the pavilion. Why?

Well, OK, what other time will you get …

The new MySQL 5.1.7 XML functions let you manipulate XML-formatted text strings using XPath query expressions.

You've got string ExtractValue(XML, XPath) - this let's you query a (sub)fragment of the XML fragment and returns the text content of the node that was found (if multiple nodes apply, the text contents of all these nodes are concatenated and separated by a space character, which is then returned). And, you've got XML UpdateXML(XML, XPath, XML) - this let's you search XML fragments and allows you to replace them with another XML fragment.

The funny thing is, it looks as though the XPath query is handled very differently in either case. Consider this little snippet (you might wan't …

Spotted via Google News: Ellison: Open source needs big vendors to thrive

That's ok, Larry! That's why we eat healthy, partner with for instance HP and Dell, and grow pretty darn fast ourselves, too. With no intention of stopping.
Since I joined the company in 2001, we've doubled our employee count and revenue pretty much every year. For a "normal" company, that would be a very scary growth rate. For MySQL AB it is "interesting" too, but it's working.

Larry also says:
"Are we interested? It's a tiny company. I think the revenues from MySQL are between US$30 million and US$40 million. Oracle's revenue next year is US$15 billion."Our business model yields happy customers, while your bottom line makes customers squirm and try to escape at every opportunity - particularly when the billing method …

I’ve been working on an updated article on Normalization, click the read more link and tell me what you think.

(the formatting is horrid thanks to Wordpress, please ignore and pay attention to the content, thanks

An Introduction to Database Normalization

Table of Contents

Introduction

Mike’s Bookstore

First Normal Form

Defining Relationships

Second Normal Form

Third Normal Form

Joining Tables

Conclusion

Resources

Introduction

Over the years I, like many of you, have had the experience of taking over responsibility for an existing …

I sat the MySQL Core Exam in November, and I'm happy to report that I passed!

Last month came time to sit the pro exam, and not feeling as confident after what was quite a tough core sitting, I thought it was time for some study. While some things might appear obvious to some, I thought I'd share the notes I took when I was reading it:

• Enums and sets can be set by their 'bit' value or actual value.
• <=> is the null safe equivalent to =
• MyISAM provides no data caches (except query cache). It relies on the host OS to provide it.
• InnoDB can use a raw partition for its tablespace
• There is a general log file which can store all queries (as well as of course binary log & slow query)
• Temporary tables can be named the same as non-temporary tables, with the temporary taking precedence (could open possibilities)

I'm largely self taught, so having …