Arjen was mentioning about the perks of working at MySQL. It got me interested, so I joined them :) So I guess this is my change in affiliation announcement.

A timely photo from William, that I scanned in… (circa a couple of years back)

I don’t know if I can talk about what I do yet (I’m a Community Engineer). I already have a task on hand, but I guess there are meeting times to work out, and other stuff. I’m rather excited, and my drive (that was lost for a while) is back. I’m not leaving any mentioned project either, in fact I think my Fedora goodness should be stepped up, as will the OOo (db related) stuff.

I just read this very interesting post on Kaj Arnö's blog.

Word is, the major database open-sourcerers ;-) (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Firebird and others) might start a consortium, and collaborate more where it is convenient.

I find this very interesting. If it works out, it may be a new milestone in professionalism and standardistation, and help out people choosing the right product.

Already, a link is given for a putative website. Right now, it's nothing, but I'll be putting a link up in my sidebar as soon as there's more news.

The database market is experiencing some changes. All major database players now have either a no-cost database, or even an Open Source database. A month ago, that was still not the case.

Personally, I think it’s a good thing when there are new, lower-cost database alternatives offered to customers. However, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is about much more than “cheap”. Market research (such as Evans Data) so far indicates that “lite” versions haven’t gained much traction. I believe the reason is that most users are looking for a full-featured database product, not a handicapped trial version.

As a footnote related to the power of OS DBs, Business Week reports about the Evans Data survey as follows, …

This is the Saturday afternoon that I am not spending discussing MySQL with the Greek MySQL community, strolling on the Acropolis.

See, MySQL AB has had a developer meeting in Athens. The Dev-MTX has met, i.e. the eXtended Development Management Team. Wednesday morning, I had already checked in to the Frankfurt-Athens flight (coming from the OS DB Conference). As I came to the airport, the flight was cancelled due to an airport strike and I had to return back home to Finland instead.

In the meantime, David Axmark, Michael Schiff and Serg Golubchik cleared out the situation in Athens, by

• hosting a small user meeting at our hotel in Athens on Thursday
• presenting at the University of Piraeus today Saturday

In general, there are a lot of …

Brad Fitzpatrick has a nice discussion over what people should be using for their ‘id’ keys in a distributed environment. and puts a couple of points forward about why it isn’t such a good idea for his application/architecture. which has a ‘few’ central machines handing out ID’s.

The is a central problem with sequences that i’ve seen in most DB platforms. That and their 32-bit size. (I think mysql is 32-bit, i’m sure the geeks who read this will correct me)

The actual question has (If I am reading this correctly) is not about UUID’s vs local-sequences, but how do I move a ‘tree’ of records from one cluster to another, and not have a ID-clash. as if each cluster was independant, it wouldnt be a concern. you would have a central USER->cluster mapping algorithm/server which might be UUID or 64-bit based and then all future requests …

A few weeks ago, I posted my Zend Framework Wishlist. Most of the things I mentioned were off the top of my head, but I think it got people (including me) thinking about how we can make some security problems easier to solve. It also attracted the attention of Open Enterprise Trends, who interviewed me and published a story about the framework. Although it's a bit hard to tell from reading the story, I was interviewed prior to being involved.

I just signed the CLA (Contributor License Agreement) today, so now Brain Bulb is officially part of the project. I'm going to be putting a lot more thought into the topics I brought up in my wishlist, and I hope to make some positive contributions …

Last week somebody actually asked me: "Does Red Hat own Linux?"

While trying to explain open source software licensing, I started to think about something even more important:

What does it mean to "own" something, anyway?

Does owning simply mean having legal title to something?

Or does it mean effective control of it?

Or, does it actually mean being able to derive economic benefit from it?

In most industries, especially capital intensive ones with high sunk costs (such as real estate, hotels, finance, and entertainment), there is a common practice of separating legal ownership from control and economic value. Investment partnerships or funds are formed to acquire assets, but control is vested in a small number of general or managing partners, and the economic benefits are divided up--usually to the advantage of those managing partners.

In …

I recently finished the first stage of a new chapter for the MySQL reference manual to help developers write their own custom storage engines.

The chapter is now online at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/custom-engine.html and, while being pre-release documentation regarding pre-release functionality, it will hopefully be of use to anyone looking to write their own storage engine.

In the next few weeks I hope to improve the existing work and add information on implementing indexing, transactions, and other advanced storage engine features.

While reading http://www.futhark.ch/mysql/109.html, at first I thought by “add to set” they meant “add to the definition set”. Wouldn’t it be great to have an easy command to alter the table and change the enum or set definitions? Is there something like that?