It's no secret that corporations are swimming in more data than ever before. IDC has recently pegged data growth at 48% a year, which means that corporate data nearly doubles every two years at many companies. In addition, purchased applications and custom built systems continue to bring in new databases that require attention, and business intelligence remains a red-hot area for modern enterprises with many companies building analytic data warehouses or data marts that continually feed information to key decision makers.

A while ago I complained about a range of very evil bugs inside the Windows version of MySQL QueryBrowser: http://db4free.blogspot.com/2006/01/whats-wrong-with-mysql-querybrowser.html

Now, version 1.1.20 has been released. After skipping (but still tested, at least for a short amount of time) five versions in a row (still used 1.1.14), I found out that the "killer bugs" that I knew about are now removed, so I gave 1.1.20 a try and updated MySQL QueryBrowser to its most current version again.

It's still too short to really say that this version is now free of heavy bugs, but it looks well so far and I'm confident that at least the times of skipping versions are over again.

A long while ago I added a seemingly idiotic feature to MDB2: The ability to disable the execution of queries.

The idea was that with the combination of a debug handler it would be possible for people to create a dump of SQL queries generated by MDB2_Schema during the installation or updating of a schema. All you would need to do is write up a debug handler for MDB2. Finally you would set the "disable_query" parameter when calling MDB2_Schema::updateDatabase() to true.

<?php
function dump_to_file(&$db, $scope, $message, $is_manip)
{
    if ($is_manip) {
        $fp = fopen('dump.sql', 'a');
        fwrite($fp, $message."\n");
        fclose($fp);
    }
}

$dsn = 'mysql://root:@localhost/foo';

// customize MDB2_SCHEMA configuration options as needed
$options = array(
    'debug' => true,
    'portability' => (MDB2_PORTABILITY_ALL ^ MDB2_PORTABILITY_EMPTY_TO_NULL),
    'debug_handler' => 'dump_to_file',
);

$manager =& …

Found this recently, O’Reilly published a section of their Baseball Hacks book covering how to download and install a database of baseball statistics, going back to 1871:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/baseballhks/chapter/hack10.pdf

Should provide some interesting sample data to tinker with.

I've been busy of late, most of my time seems to be taken up with fixing layout bugs in my web applications introduced when I spend all day testing in FireFox which works perfectly, then only to have a quick test on I.E. to notice that there is a tiny portion of the page which is out and in the most ugly way possible. I then tend to mess the whole page up trying to track down where it might have come from. I suppose I should have learnt to test in I.E. early in the process but that means leaving the debugger and CSS edit facilities of FireFox behind.

Anyway back to the point, this means I have less and less time to devote to MySQL these days, but that doesn't stop me popping into the MySQL forums a couple of times a day (for no other reason than to stop me going crazy messing around with I.E.). I've posted a few times here recently on the need to be as descriptive as possible but …

I've always regarded Andy Hertzfeld as the quintessential Mac programmer.  He was on the original Macintosh team back in the early 1980s, wrote much of the user interface code, wrote the first task-switching program, founded Radius, General Magic, and then later became involved in open source through a commpany he founded called Eazel. 

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Mac, Hertzfeld created a collection of stories on the early days at Apple, which he published at www.folklore.com under a creative commons license.  He also made the underlying software available under an open source license.  For those who remember fondly the days of the early Mac it's exciting to relive those old days.  The stories were later published by O'Reilly as the coffee table book called " …

Ronald Bradford's article about Testing/Trialing new MySQL Releases (an excellent idea!) made me think of another idea which could help MySQL to promote its products.

There are still many people without fast speed access to the internet to download files with many MBs of size. And there might be many people who would be interested in testing MySQL, but they would still need a little impulse to really get into it.

So my idea would be to sell CDs, or even better DVDs with all the free products around MySQL - maybe at net costs. This could include (for all common platforms)

* the current GA releases of MySQL server
* the current development releases of MySQL
* the client tools like QueryBrowser, Administrator, MigrationToolkit, etc.
* all the API drivers like JDBC, .NET, …

By now, I’m sure you have all heard about Free VMware Player allowing easy and quick access to see, view and use other OS’s easily. For those Windows users out there, now is your chance to trial MySQL under Linux with no impact to your system, why wait.

See the MySQL Virtual Machine details on the VMware site. On closer inspection this effectively pushes you to the VMware Technology Network (VMTN) page within the MySQL website.

The MySQL guys needs to update their site to reflect new reference to the free player, rather then a trial version of Workstation. Even VMware Server is free (could be mentioned). You can read more about the offerings etc at a …

First of all the good news: there are a lot of great things to come in MySQL! I recently found Ronald Bradford's article about the MySQL Users Group Meeting in Brisbane where he met with Brian Aker, MySQL's Director of Architecture. They discussed the features of MySQL 5.1 and also the future of MySQL beyond 5.1 - you should really read that ... there's great stuff to come!

However, there's still a lot of other work to be done. After I wrote about foreign key dependencies and Beat Vontobel joined in to extend my example to automatically remove foreign key dependencies with MySQL 5.0, we …

Still in "ponder" mode on the possible Oracle acquisition of JBoss, and came across this interesting tidbit from the Enterprise Open Source Journal (worth a read, if for no other reason than to see Julie in "pensive mode :-). Mark Driver from Gartner writes [PDF download]:

"The [Oracle acquisition of InnoBase] has left many of us scratching our collective heads. On the surface, the motives seem obvious. Oracle, with a clear history of aggressive acquisitions, buys out a critical component of MySQL in order to kill off its commercial support channel. The problem is, we don't actually know the motive yet because Oracle has been mysteriously silent about the acquisition, citing "license negotiations" as the reason. By the time you read this, the issue may be resolved, but I fear it's a lose lose situation for …