As Matt and I were chatting about his experience thus far at Alfresco he hit upon the fact that they are running into many organizations that still think open source = free as in cost. In some cases, they are standardizing on certain open source applications but not paying any support or license fees (but remain within the confines of the licensing). It's not that these customers are cheap - it's just that if they don't have to pay for support (because they don't need it), why should they?

Anyway, this led me to wonder if software that is available as truly free can realistically expect to recognize significant revenue on a recurring basis. MySQL is doing well signing users up for the MySQL Network, and Sleepycat and db4objects have done very …

The subject almost says it all - I just built an RPM of the MySQL Administrator 1.1.5 for SUSE 10.0 (x86) - it's now available from my RPM section, as usual. Have fun!

I've been an Oracle developer for around 8 years. For the first few years I was on my own, a PL/SQL book and Metalink was all I had to find my way in the Oracle darkness. As my experience grew the books became less of an aid and Metalink is often like looking for a needle in a haystack. So I had a look around at the various forums around, they were all much of a muchness, but one just seemed to be much more of a community than the rest. That was Quests Pipelines, what was great about it was that 1. people answered the questions quickly and 2. there were a lot of people answering. I've always found that you get just as much by answering questions than you do asking them, most of our time as developers is spent on mundane repetitive tasks or at least on stuff that doesn't push the boundaries of SQL too much. Maybe once or twice we need to do something a little more …

Quest Software maintains a Portal web site, called the Quest Pipelines. Among others, it also has a MySQL Pipeline, that is worth a visit. I liked these two recent articles:

• Using and Tuning of the Query Cache by Boyd Hemphill
• Formatting Output in MySQL by Andrew Gilfrin, which is the "MySQL Tip of the Month" for December

Enjoy!

This is just a heads up that MDB2 is rapidly approaching its first release candidate. This means that the API will from that point on not be subject to modifications and only bug fixes will be applied. Considering the stability of the code I do not envision that it will take many RC's to get MDB2 stable out of the door.

If you look at the current open bug reports for DB you will notice that alot of them are structural issues that are close to impossible to fix at this point. These are obviously all solved in MDB2. Aside from that MDB2 has way more features and is way more flexible. Most amazingly it has been shown to be …

Yes hints are evil, because they circumvent the entire beauty of runtime query optimizers. However if you really do know whats best and know that your query optimizer really does not know whats best, even if you make sure the table stats etc are all in order you can decide that "hardcoding" the query execution plan is best.

Now SQL tuning books devote entire chapters on how to add redundant where conditions, redundant additions and multiplications. The last such chapter I have read was in "SQL tuning". There it gave a tip on how to control the order in which joins are done using the following trick:

... AND T1.Key2_ID=T2.Key2_ID
AND T1.Key3_ID+0*T2.Key2_ID=T3.Key3_ID ...

Now this is getting insane! It seems obvious that there is a demand for being able to restrict or even hardcode the entire query execution plan! However the SQL standard is …

I’m preparing to speak at the next MySQL Brisbane Users Group in Febraury 2006. My topic will be Know your competitor - A MySQL Developers Guide to Using Oracle Express Edition.

Having a strong background in Oracle, and having been using MySQL for the past 5 years, the release of Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (XE) as a Free offering (with limitations of 1 CPU, 1GB Ram, and 4GB disk) is an interesting move by Oracle.

I’ve written a number of recent comments on various Oracle/MySQL things including Responses to some Oracle v?s MySQL Questions, How can Oracle 10g …

Looks like Jay and I will be presenting at the 2006 MySQL User's Conference in Santa Clara in April. Vee (from O'Reilly) just sent the notification this evening that our proposal was accepted. This news is exciting, foremost because it means that I'll be attending the conference. Oh, I've been there for the past two years but there's never a gaurantee that I'll get to return unless I'm on the program to present. Secondly that I'll get a chance to hang out with Jay, who I've only met once in person after many months of virtual slavery writing Pro MySQL.

Now that I say that, if the community team isn't already thinking about this, I think it would be cool to have a "Meet Planet MySQL" function where contributors and members of the …

I have the base Fedora Core 4 installed with only a couple issues. When I decided to install the new OS and update my software, I figured I might as well upgrade my Hard Drive. I got an Ultra ATA/133 200G drive and replaced my 20G drive. Of course, I didn't read the package and didn't notice I needed a different I/O card. Back to CompUSA to get the new card.

The second little glitch was I downloaded the ISO images and burned them to CD. Except I didn't realized I had to burn them in a specific way. The second time I figured it out and was able to install right off CD.

The particular distribution I used had Firefox 1.0.4 and OpenOffice 1.9 (2.0 beta) so I'm no further ahead in that respect. Since I was planning on re-installing these packages anyway, it's not a big deal. My first task, however, is to get the MySQL 5.0 source and get Apache configured. More updates to come...

Well, it's official. I've been accepted for at least two sessions at the 2006 MySQL User Conference.

Get ready to register and you could be watching:

Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL
The Sakila Sample Database

Which of course means I need to get the Sakila sample DB released *soon* so that I can tweak it before the conference gets too close.

I'm looking forward to this year's conference, every year is bigger and better than the last.