I temporarily withdraw my recommendation until the intentions of Oracle become less cloudy...

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Allow me to make a recommendation to my fellow Free Software
developers.  Oracle Corporation's recent business practices show
aggression toward the Free/Open Source Software community, and their
database couldn't be confused with Free software if one had allergies
and a blindfold on.

Therefore, I recommend to my compatriots in the F/OSS community the
deprecation of oracle as a database back end to our software.  I am not
necessarily suggesting that software currently providing compatibility
with the database remove the existing support; however, moving forward,
the effort that would otherwise be spent creating an oracle connectivity
layer might instead be spent adding support for one of the many fine
F/OSS database engines.

For more information on the process of deprecating software, see Wikipedia: …

MySQL 5.1.7 introduces a new RENAME DATABASE command. Today, I've updated my BitKeeper MySQL 5.1 version, so I had the opportunity to already test this command. I found two bugs, which will definitely be in 5.1.7, as the development tree has already switched to 5.1.8:

Bug 17564: the RENAME DATABASE command doesn't change the privileges, so privileges might be lost, when the database name is changed.

Bug 17565: all events that were stored in the database will be lost after the database is renamed.

I am a huge fan of FastCGI, due in large part to prior time spent using it while developing web applications in C++. At the same time, I am something of an Apache 2 fan, but my past experiences with mod_fastcgi and Apache 2 left much to be desired.

So, lighttpd appears on my personal radar; by all accounts (verified now by personal experience) the FastCGI support is excellent. On top of that, server/site configuration is also a breeze. I won’t even bother to discuss performance (top notch).

Just that fast, I’ve stopped using Apache and started using lighttpd. I’m sure I will eventually encounter some reason why I should use both, but so far that reason does not exist and lighttpd is far and away my new favorite web server.

Why did I bother?

Django! Trying to deploy a Django site with mod_python under Apache was kicking my head in, in no small part due to the complete lack of actually useful documentation on …

I am a huge fan of FastCGI, due in large part to prior time spent using it while developing web applications in C++. At the same time, I am something of an Apache 2 fan, but my past experiences with mod_fastcgi and Apache 2 left much to be desired.

So, lighttpd appears on my personal radar; by all accounts (verified now by personal experience) the FastCGI support is excellent. On top of that, server/site configuration is also a breeze. I won’t even bother to discuss performance (top notch).

Just that fast, I’ve stopped using Apache and started using lighttpd. I’m sure I will eventually encounter some reason why I should use both, but so far that reason does not exist and lighttpd is far and away my new favorite web server.

Why did I bother?

Django! Trying to deploy a Django site with mod_python under Apache was kicking my head in, in no small part due to the complete lack of actually useful documentation on …

Thanks to hartmut for pointing to this: MySQL AB acquired Netfrastructure Inc. Jim Starkey, one of the founders of Netfrastructure Inc., is now working full-time for MySQL AB.

Well, who's Jim Starkey?

Jim Starkey, the original creator of InterBase which became Firebird, just made it publicly known that he now works for MySQL AB.

More details on Firebird News.

Upgrading MySQL-Cluster

So MySQL Cluster is heading towards disk storage , time to upgrade my development environment in that direction. After the upgrade I ran into the following problem

mysql> create table blah (i int, c char) engine=ndb;
ERROR 1005 (HY000): Can't create table './test/blah.frm' (errno: 4009)

And the mysql error database doesn't really help :)

perror --ndb 4009
OS error code 4009:  Cluster Failure: Unknown result: Unknown result error

In the ndbd log it showed that the MySQL nodes connect but never really continued to start, strange no more logs and no help on the error. Took me a while to figure out that MySQL-Max wasn't upgraded . MySQL-Max used to be required for NDB (dunno if it still is) and all of MySQL packages were already at 5.1.6 except for the Max package which deamon was actually running and which was still at 4.1.12 :)

You obviously know what I'll …

Our friends from New York PHP just announced the New York PHP Conference & Expo 2006 and have invited speakers to send proposals for session talks and tutorials.

The conference is taking place in New York City, at the historic New Yorker Hotel, June 14-16, 2006. There will be three full days of sessions, tutorials, exhibits, and networking events. NYPHPCon 2006 focuses on the The PHP Business Community, with two featured parallel tracks: Business Strategy and Technical Solutions. Over 400 are expected to attend, including business and technical professionals from around the world.

Submittal deadline for proposals: April 15, 2006

More information at the conference website: http://www.nyphpcon.com

Our friends from New York PHP just announced the New York PHP Conference & Expo 2006 and have invited speakers to send proposals for session talks and tutorials.

The conference is taking place in New York City, at the historic New Yorker Hotel, June 14-16, 2006. There will be three full days of sessions, tutorials, exhibits, and networking events. NYPHPCon 2006 focuses on the The PHP Business Community, with two featured parallel tracks: Business Strategy and Technical Solutions. Over 400 are expected to attend, including business and technical professionals from around the world.

Submittal deadline for proposals: April 15, 2006

More information at the conference website: http://www.nyphpcon.com

In the last minute life of Colin, I managed to get a flight on Tuesday to head to Singapore for Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu Asian Business Tour, pretty much in the nick of time. It was a complete rush from getting the tickets, to reaching the hotel, and getting to the Singapore Management University (arrived only five minutes past!). The LUGS meets are large - going by the numbers, it seemed larger than what we have at LUV in Melbourne, and definitely greater than the MYOSS meetups.

Mark is an excellent speaker, who told us about Ubuntu’s place in the market, and all the cool things Canonical is doing to extend its reach. Being on a tight schedule, he didn’t stick around for after-talk discussions, but quite a number of other folk did. Harish Pillay (RH’s CTA in Singapore) had a couple of boxes of Fedora Core 4 giveaways, which a lot were pleased to snap up!

So I stuck around to have some dinner, and realised something …

CREATE PROCEDURE and CREATE FUNCTION in MySQL currently (as of 5.0.18) don't allow for an explicit DEFINER= clause. This has dangerous implications for any setup in which stored routines and replication are used together.

The DEFINER of a stored routine currently is always set to the CURRENT_USER at the time of the CREATE statement, there is no possibility to override this with an explicit setting. If you issue a CREATE command as root on the MySQL server, that's what you get:

mysql-master [root]> CREATE PROCEDURE test() DETERMINISTIC SELECT 'test';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql-master [root]> SELECT * FROM information_schema.routines
    WHERE ROUTINE_NAME='test'\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
     SPECIFIC_NAME: test
               ...
           DEFINER: root@localhost
1 row in set …