(republished from Slashdot)

So, lets begin this statement with "these are my thoughts, not those that represent MySQL's". First of all I was one of the people who had us stop building on SCO in the first place. For a while now we have not been building for SCO, and had only been providing binaries for customers who had an existing contract with us for those binaries.

The source code for MySQL has always compiled for SCO unixen and since MySQL is open source anyone was free to compile it themselves. We don't ship Amiga binaries either but I can tell you that there is a group out there who keeps MySQL working on that platform as well. So our lack of support for SCO just meant that users were forced to either compile MySQL themselves or find a third party who were distributing the binaries.

Now why should we provide …

By rael

From Ascii to Python, CSS to MySQL, cheats aren't just for gamers....

So I picked up my new laptop on friday. It’s an ASUS V6V - nice and fast, light, good resolution screen and lots of disk and RAM (it came with 1GB, I’ve got 2GB).

Anyway, the transfer of data from my PowerBook went fine. I waited for xfsdump to dump /home from the powerbook to a firewire drive (and for “waiting” I do mean going out and seeing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - which was very good).

Installing Ubuntu on the ASUS went like a dream. Everything, and i do mean everything worked out-of-the-box with only one tweak. That was uncommented the ACPI sleep configuration option do-dad in /etc/default/acpi-something-foo to get suspend to ram working.

The WEP didn’t work in the installer, so I initially just used the GigE adapter until the first reboot.

The firewire drivers don’t really behave with this laptop atm… that dreaded “aborted sbp2 …

On public demand I added a list with my upcoming projects/tasks in the next couple of weeks. You'll find the list on the right hand side of this website.

Feel free to get in touch with me if you're in the same city at the same time as I am.

Note that my schedules might change at almost every time. I learned not to plan more than 2 or 3 weeks ahead.

I'm noticing from the MySQL forums that there is an uptake in master to master replication setups. This won't help you unless you are using 5.0, but in 5.0 you can add the options auto-increment- increment and auto-increment-offset to your my.cnf file (--auto- increment-increment=10 --auto-increment-offset=3) so that you can get the following:

mysql> CREATE TABLE animals (
-> id MEDIUMINT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
-> name CHAR(30) NOT NULL,
-> PRIMARY KEY (id)
-> );
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> INSERT INTO animals (name) VALUES ('dog'),('cat'),('penguin'),
-> ('lax'),('whale'),('ostrich');
Query OK, 6 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 6 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> SELECT * FROM animals;
+----+---------+
| id | name |
…

I have heard some concerns about SCO's announcement regarding MySQL support. IMHO all this is not about MySQL AB, nor about SCO, but about serving users of the SCO platform who use MySQL.

As the announcement notes, the news is about including SCO in MySQL Network, so that certified binaries and support are available for this platform. Users of the SCO platform deserve having quality support available for their database deployments just like anyone else on any other platform. Right?

By chance, I came across this interactive interactive SQL tutorial — select your preferred engine, create queries for a variety of exercises, see the results online immediately. Instructive for the beginner, possibly fun for the advanced. : )

An interesting story broke in the Financial Times (FT) last night while I was having dinner with a some journalists who cover open source technology.  The State of Massachussetts has not only been quite active in supporting and encouraging open source software, now they've introduced a directive that would require 50,000 desktop computers used by State employees to abandon Microsoft Office in favor of standard compliant alternatives such as Open Office and Star Office.  This is pretty bold step.  They don't want to be locked in to proprietary file formats.  From my discussions with other government IT organizations, it's a pretty common sentiment.  People are sick of the lock-in from closed source vendors and their hardball negotiation tactics.  So maybe Massachussetts is playing a little hardball of their own.  Good for them! 

There have been similar proposals and …

Here's a quick function you may find useful, it calculates a timespan in hours and quarter hours (4.25, 5.5, 6.75, etc):

DELIMITER $$
        
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `upto`.`hours_and_quarter_hours`$$
CREATE FUNCTION `upto`.`hours_and_quarter_hours`(p_start_time DATETIME, p_end_time DATETIME) RETURNS decimal(5,2)
BEGIN
        
    DECLARE quarter_hours INTEGER;
        
    SET quarter_hours = CEILING((UNIX_TIMESTAMP(p_end_time) - UNIX_TIMESTAMP(p_start_time)) / 900);
        
    RETURN FLOOR(quarter_hours / 4) + (MOD(quarter_hours,4) * .25);
        
END$$
        
DELIMITER ;

Greetings!

I’m MySQL’s new Director of Product Management, having been here a whole two months now! It’s a very busy time with eveything that’s going on at the company, but I’ll do my best to post thoughts out here as much as possible.

In case any of you database junkies out there want to know my background, I have lots of years in the DBA trenches with DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, and Sybase. For the last 6 years, I was the VP of product management at Embarcadero Technologies and was busy making database tools there.

Feel free to shoot me any feedback on whatever’s on your MySQL mind.

Robin Schumacher
rschumacher@mysql.com