Had Neil McAllister asked, instead, can open source innovate, I might have been more gracious to his argument. But he effectively answered his own question simply by adding the word "companies."

McAlllister, a bit dated on his understanding of open source business models (It's not his fault - he hasn't attended OSBC yet. Well, that is his fault, but it's one of which he can repent :-). Open source stopped being solely about "professional open source" well over a year ago. That's no longer the primary business model. It's never been the most interesting, though good companies like Red Hat and JBoss make good money from it.

Having lumped open source together under the professional open source model (i.e., a support model), McAllister then rushes to (somewhat accurately, I …

Who could believe that a single person can make a difference in European politics?

Well, I could, since otherwise I wouldn’t have staunchly supported Florian throughout his campaign against Software Patents. But I have to confess, Florian took us all for a ride I had no clue about in the beginning. And now he is mentioned alongside the likes of Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Angela Merkel, Bono, and Bob Geldof who are also nominated by European Voice for the European of the Year awards.

Florian just issued a press statement, partly quoted below:

In a first reaction, Mueller said that he is “honored by this nomination”, but he was quick to share the glory: “I really owe this to all activists and citizens who supported our cause, especially to the FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure)”. Mueller has previously been listed among the “ …

This has been the first Oracle Openworld I’ve missed in six years. I’ve used Oracle since 1993 and have had some interesting encounters with the Redwood Shores folks over the years, so Larry’s recent Openworld comments about pricing caught my ear:

“In response to an audience question, Ellison reaffirmed his opposition to processor-based software pricing because it is difficult to verify how many processors or multicore processors a company is actually running.

Instead, he prefers to offer pricing based on the total number of employees, or based on revenue with the flexibility to address annual licensing and maintenance based on whether total headcount or revenue rises or falls during the period, he said. ”

Interesting. So if you’re successful - you pay Oracle more. This reminds me of their former hysterical model for licensing their monitoring and tuning technology. Some years ago, I was a senior DBA at an …

At work, I came across an interesting problem involving graphs for which I found no completely satisfactory solution.

A colleague tried to model applications and their dependencies as a directed graph. When editing dependencies for a given node, he wanted to show only nodes as new possible descendants which are not yet direct descendants of the current node. Additionally, when selecting new parents, nodes that are already direct parents should not be shown. Since he is still on MySQL 4.0, subselects could not be used.

Here is the data model and a bit of test data:




Continue reading "A graph problem"

A “mutex” table is a clever trick that allows joining tables while keeping them independent of each other in a query. This property allows interesting queries that are not otherwise possible. It is especially useful in earlier versions of MySQL, where it can be used to simulate some unsupported queries such as UNION and derived tables in the FROM clause. My standard mutex table is as follows: create table mutex( i int not null primary key ); insert into mutex(i) values (0), (1); I typically use the mutex table as the leftmost table of LEFT OUTER JOIN queries.

MySQL does not support UNION prior to version 4.0.0, but it is possible to write a UNION with a mutex table and LEFT OUTER JOIN. As an example, UNION these tables together: create table colors ( title varchar(20) ); create table flavors( title varchar(20) ); insert into colors values ('blue'), ('green'); insert into flavors values ('vanilla'), ('chocolate'); The trick is to LEFT OUTER join such that the values from one table do not get included in the same row with values from other tables, then COALESCE the values to select the (only) non-NULL value from each row.

It's hard these days to imagine anything more pre-historic than enterprise licensing. At least, that's what the momentum behind Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, MySQL (i.e., Network), etc. would have us think.

Microsoft arguably brought this model to enterprise IT, and yet it continues to fail to participate. Why?

According to a group of UK-based CIOs, as reported Silicon.com, it appears that while Microsoft is bullish on getting paid constantly, it's not as bullish on the other trait that normally comes with subscription-based pricing: "cheaper."Kirk Downey, CTO at Centrica, said Microsoft has failed to address the root problem organisations have with SA - the cost - and that it compares unfavourably to programmes run by the likes of Oracle and SAP.

He said: "If Microsoft is to position its SA programme alongside annual …