Another CfP:

"The USC, Simi/Conejo, and UCLA Linux User Groups are proud to announce the 4th annual Southern California Linux Expo scheduled for February 11-12, 2006 at the Westin Hotel near the Los Angeles International Airport. Building on the tremendous success of last three years' SCALE, we will continue to promote Linux and the Open Source Software community."

See http://www.socallinuxexpo.com/ for details.

I've long admired OpenLogic and BitRock, the early providers of the "glue" that holds open source projects together. SpikeSource and SourceLabs have really made the space seem credible, but it has been OpenLogic and BitRock who have been shipping product to customers for two to three years.

The 451 Group has an interesting analysis of OpenLogic, some of which I've excerpted below: OpenLogic positions itself as elder statesman in open source services

Analyst: Dennis Callaghan
Sector: Enterprise Software »»
Date: 27 Sep 2005

With a high-profile management team, blue-chip venture backers and a Silicon Valley pedigree, SpikeSource got a lot of attention when it launched into the open source services space earlier this year. Its primary …

MySQL 4.1 adds a number of new aggregate functions, among them GROUP_CONCAT. Earlier versions require you to build and compile the function as a C++ extension, which I’m told is easy. However, that is usually not possible in a shared hosting environment. It is possible to use user variables to write some queries without GROUP_CONCAT. The key is to understand how MySQL implements selects. As the following example shows, it really loops through each row one at a time, evaluating the expression for each.

The release candidate for MySQL 5.0 is out. This little database is really growing up.

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article_959.html

I'm doing an analysis of commonalities between successful open source projects (If you can point me to good research on the topic, please email me!!!), and came across an interesting academic paper (Requires purchase) related to the subject. Here are some of its findings (none of which will be surprising to those who have followed Joel West and Siobhan O'Mahony's work, but surprising if you still believe in the magical open source community, numbered in the millions, anxiously waiting to contribute code to your project):

1. It is interesting to compare horizontal applications (applications used to build other software, the end user is required to program and is, likely, a software professional) with vertical ones (applications used by an end user, …

At the moment, I'm preparing for the core certification exam. Although I thought that I knew almost everything about the new features in MySQL 4.1, I sometimes find some fantastic "goodies" while I'm learning for the exam. One of them is the INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE command.

This command is ideal for logging. You can insert into a table, but do an update, if the row (based on the primary key) already exists. An example might explain this best:

mysql> CREATE TABLE logdata (
    ->    id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
    ->    count INT NOT NULL,
    ->    PRIMARY KEY (id)) ENGINE=MyISAM;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)


mysql> INSERT INTO logdata (id, count)
    ->    VALUES (1, 1)
    ->    ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
    ->    count = count + 1;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.02 sec)


mysql> INSERT INTO logdata (id, count)
    -> …

This example tries to simulate an ATM transfer system using MySQL Stored Procedures. We will also use one view and a cursor in this example.

We use three tables. One table will hold the account information, the name of the account holder, the account type and the limit of the account. We will have to take care that the balance of the account doesn't fall below this limit. The second table will store the balance of the account. This table enforces a 1:1 relation to the first table with the account information.

Here are the SQL commands for creating the tables and filling them with sample data:

CREATE TABLE  atm_accounts (
  `acc_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `acc_owner` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  `acc_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  `acc_limit` decimal(10,2) NOT NULL default '0.00',
  PRIMARY KEY  (`acc_id`),
  KEY `acc_limit` (`acc_limit`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT …

I just finished reading through Yankee Group's 2005 North American Linux and Windows TCO Comparison Report, Part 2, available here. The general take is that Windows is equal to Linux in terms of security, because of improvements Microsoft has made (both process and code-level) and because of improvements Linux has not yet made.

Now, I was a bit cavalier in dismissing Microsoft the other day. This is largely due to how the company markets itself - "Microsoft is good because you already use us, and might as well use more." That's weak, obviously, and not consistent with the value that the company actually provides (value that JBoss certainly sees.

What stood out to me in this report …

There are of course various ways to prepare for MySQL certification. Some ideas come to mind.

• 
  
• Take a 4 weeks vacation with the Study Guide and read, read, read
  
• Try to bribe the certification team (unfortunately just one guy, 1.96m tall)
  
• Pray to god or do some other voodoo
  
• ...
  

I passed Core exam and failed Pro exam on my first attempt and did the Pro exam again during the MySQL Consulting Bootcamp in Munich a couple of weeks ago. I'm still waiting for the results, wish me luck.

Soon, there will by MySQL 5.0 (release candidate is …