MySQL 5.0 is out. With a nice contest to win a Nano. If you’re so inclined. I have setup a PHP 5.1 and MySQL 5 server, that will be available to anyone who needs it, and has a project they want to test. MySQL 5, is running in strict mode. PHP 5.1 is built with mysqli extension only.
You must be familiar with a linux shell, sftp, and mysql. I really encourage you to report bugs etc, to the MySQL and PHP developers. The point of this is to allow people to test their own apps, and their favorite OSS apps (phpBB, mambo, etc), work with MySQL 5, and PHP. Contact me via email, or comment here.

MySQL 5.0 is out. With a nice contest to win a Nano. If you're so inclined. I have setup a PHP 5.1 and MySQL 5 server, that will be available to anyone who needs it, and has a project they want to test. MySQL 5, is running in strict mode. PHP 5.1 is built with mysqli extension only. You must be familiar with a linux shell, sftp, and mysql. I really encourage you to report bugs etc, to the MySQL and PHP developers. The point of this is to allow people to test their own apps, and their favorite OSS apps (phpBB, mambo, etc), work with MySQL 5, and PHP. Contact me via email, or comment here.

I've locked 16 people in a room and we have to carve out from a giant
list what will be in 5.2. 13 engineers, 1 product manager, 1 project
manager, and a sales engineer. We have some pizza, two bottles of
wine, and 20 cans of soda.

I didn't allow anyone to eat the pizza until we finished going
through the entire list once. That took 11 hours.

I don't need sleep, and we have less then 24 hours to get through
this hell.

Here's a quick trigger demo. In this case I am forcing all values in a BOOL (converted to TINYINT(1)) column to be either 0 or 1. Of course, it is not operating in strict mode as it just changes non-zero values to 1 instead of causing an error:

mysql> use test;
Database changed
        
CREATE TABLE booltest (
  boolcol tinyint(1) default NULL
) ;
        
mysql> CREATE TRIGGER is_bool BEFORE INSERT ON booltest
    -> FOR EACH ROW SET NEW.boolcol = IF(NEW.boolcol = 0, 0, 1);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
        
mysql> INSERT INTO booltest values(2);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.05 sec)
        
mysql> SELECT * FROM booltest;
+---------+
| boolcol |
+---------+
|       1 |
+---------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
        
mysql> INSERT INTO booltest values(3);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
        
mysql> SELECT * FROM booltest;
+---------+
| boolcol |
+---------+
|       1 |
|       1 |
+---------+
2 rows in set (0.00 …

Like all procedural database languages I know, the MySQL stored procedure language supports explicit cursors. I just wrote "explicit cursor" but for I'll refer to those by just saying "cursor".

A cursor allows a programmer to traverse a set of records retrieved by a relational database query in a sequential, one-by-one fashion. As such, a cursor forms an interface between the relationally oriented, declarative SQL language and the procedurally oriented calling context. A database cursor is like a pointer positioned somewhere in a resultset which can be moved programmatically to browse through all the records in the resultset. So, that's quite analogous to the wordprocessor cursor you use to browse through the characters and words on your computer screen.

(For those that are wondering what an implicit cursor is - well, that's just a piece of memory used by the database server to work with resulsets internally. …

Audris Mockus (Avaya Labs), Roy Fielding (eBuilt), and James Herbsleb (Bell Laboratories) have posted interesting research on how open source development communities work, using Apache and Mozilla to frame hypotheses of successful open source projects. You can find the paper - "Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla" - here. It's worth a read, especially if you're a commercial entity (or a VC investing in such) looking to build an open source community around your company's project.

The authors of the report list a few hypotheses developed from their analysis of Apache, and then refine them in light of their Mozilla analysis (and, unless I misread, they also tested them against a few other projects). The results are interesting:Hypothesis 1a: Open source developments will have a core of …

We made the release candidate for 5.0 this week, which is pretty cool since personally I have been wanting to feel comfortable enough to use it on my servers :)

Eweek article took my quote from Slashdot, though no one quoted me from this comment except our director of sales engineering :)

I am very happy with the changes to 5.0. I've been a user of MySQL since Monty first released it. At the time I had an application that was using MiniSQL and was watching it blow up. I ported it over to MySQL and from then on everything was good. I am especially happy to see the gotcha list for bad data inserts go away. That was perhaps the one …

InformationWeek's cover story this week is "Open Source Goes Corporate" describing in depth 10 large corporate users of Open Source software.  Although there are quotes from MySQL guru Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo, the real story is about how mainstream corporate users like ABN Amro, Sabre, Fidelity, Disney, Continental Airlines and others are now adopting open source software.  For anyone who needs evidence to show their managers that open source is good enough for Enterprise use, this is a great article.  These are big applications in billion dollar companies.  They may not be "betting the farm" on a completely open source environment, but they are using it for business critical applications that have dozens or even hundreds of servers.  …

I've had it with Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0. Whenever I encounter a .pdf file that has both graphics and text on it, I can't seem to print it. No matter what I try to do, I just can't print the whole thing.

I recently upgraded to Acrobat Reader 7.0 on all my machines. My wife's computer is a W2K box that has the Brother HL-1440 printer attached to it. My laptop runs XP and I can normally print to the Brother with no problems over the network. My main box is a RH9 box that also prints to the same printer via the network.

I received an invoice from MySQL AB for the training I attended last week. I viewed it fine with Acrobat Reader 7.0 and then clicked "Print". Only the logos and lines on the document came out. So I tried a couple of the different "Comments and Forms" options in the Print dialog. Same thing. I figured my printer drivers might be out of date, so I updated them and tried again. Boxes and graphics only. Then I …

I was tinkering a bit with integrating Wordpress and Gallery2 and in the process posted some photos from a trip to Prague I took earlier this year as part of a MySQL developer conference. If all works well, you can click the image below to see them: