Scale out with MySQL is highlighted in an interesting article CIO Jury: Microsoft licensing slammed by UK IT chiefs in the CIO Jury forum of silicon.com — who add “Microsoft wants to have its cake, eat it and charge users to watch”.

One IT director who did not wish to be named simply said open source “looks more and more tempting” while Paul Broome, IT director at 192.com, said he plans to migrate off Windows server and SQL server as soon as he can.

Broome said: “It’s a millstone to enterprise for an SME. To allow us to grow, all new database servers will use 64-bit Linux and MySQL. We’ve had enough. We can’t scale out with Microsoft as it’s too expensive.”

Good thinking, Paul!

I've intended to write about this a few times, but the overall GPL process seems to be so, ah, methodical, that a week here or there probably doesn't matter one way or the other.  At any rate, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been working on updating the GPL license in order to take into account just how software is used and deployed in the 21st century.  Much of the GPL license (and some of the confusion around it) is based around the notion of distribution, which was apppropriate back when the GPL was created, but now more and more software is never distributed it's just hosted at companies like Yahoo, Google, Amazon and others. Technically the GPL license is known as a "reciprocal" license meaning that if you distribute GPL licensed software with your own software that must also …

Yesterday was "RPM day" for me. At work, I have been busy building RPMs of the Intel icc 9.0 shared libs that we provide for our MySQL binaries compiled with Intel icc. In addition to that, I created an RPM that contains the required configuration files and scripts to access the MySQL VPN using OpenVPN and SUSE Linux in a convenient way.

While trying to sync my web site to my workstation using the Unison File Synchronizer I noticed that the version on SUSE Linux is quite outdated and refused to cooperate with the unison server on my Debian box. Hence I bit the bullet and …

It's time again! The MySQL Users Conference, 2006 edition, will be held in Santa Clara, CA. Yep, same place as last year. The exact dates are: April 24-27. For complete details, see http://www.mysqluc.com/

I'm doing the program chair job again - heaps of fun (and hard work ;-)

The deadline for proposals is November 7, 2005.
http://www.mysqluc.com/cs/mysqluc2006/create/e_sess
I'll be expecting your submission, and please please don't wait till the last minute....

PW says he would like to find a way of executing several UPDATE statements in one table using just one query.
In practice, he has several products from different companies, and he wants to update them in a compact way, without repeating the same query several times.

For example, PW wants to apply a different discount on books from IT, finance, and current affairs sections, with different amounts for each category.

One way is this one:

UPDATE books
SET discount =
   CASE
       WHEN section = 'IT'              THEN 12
       WHEN section = 'current affairs' THEN 10
       WHEN section = 'finance'         THEN 8
       ELSE discount
   END
WHERE id_publisher IN (5,6,8,11);

This query acts only on books from the requested publishers (see the WHERE clause) and among them updates the account column from the given sections.
The remaining sections the …

This request came to a programming forum: "how do I list a record set with a running count for each record?"

There are several answers to this question. The first that would come to mind should be to implement the count within the application at the receiving end of the data stream. This solution, though, requires different implementation details foe each language, and could not be what we are looking for.

Instead, there is a quick way of making MySQL count records while listing them, so that we have a result that is always the same, no matter which language we use to code our application.

Perhaps not everybody is aware that MySQL allows so called "user variables" in your queries. They are private variables for each connection, and they stay available for the whole duration of your session.

For example, a frequent usage of this feature was a workaround for lack of subqueries in MySQL versions lower than 4.1: …

For October, you will actually need to decide on which continent you want to be:

• Europe: O'Reilly European Open Source Convention, October 17-20 (Amsterdam)
  
• North America: Zend/PHP Conference, October 18-21 (San Francisco)
  
• Oceania: AUUG Annual Conference 2005, October 19-21 (Sydney)

And something new in November:

• Europe: Open Source Database Conference 2005, November 8-9 (Frankfurt)

MySQL is well represented at each of these events with speakers like Kaj Arnö, David Axmark, Lenz Grimmer, JD Duncan, Stewart Smith, Sergei …

About a month ago the last version of XAMPP was relased and now it's again time for an updated version. MySQL and PHP released new versions of their software and as usual we need to follow in their footsteps.

New in this version of XAMPP: MySQL was upgraded to version 4.1.14, and PHP was upgraded to version 5.0.5. FPDF (version 1.53) and PostgeSQL support in PHP were newly added.

The next XAMPP for Windows version will be out at beginning October. At the moment we are so busy and not able to synchronise the release of our XAMPP versions.

Goto download!

Discover. Connect. Succeed. Scale Your Business with MySQL. April 24-27, 2006 Â? Santa Clara, California

The Call for Participation is now open, and you're invited to submit a proposal to speak at the Conference. Share your knowledge and experience employing MySQL in the real world. Proposal Deadline: November 7, 2005