In Dave's last harangue (no, the one that came after spanking Shai @ SAP), he asks:

I think SugarCRM is proving that replacing proprietary apps is really not that big of a deal, but does the world need 5 more open source CRM companies?My answer? Absolutely.

SugarCRM is helping to level-set expectations of what is really needed in a CRM system, and what it should cost [Note: I'm on SugarCRM's advisory board.]. Same with Alfresco in Enterprise Content Management [Note: I work for Alfresco], JBoss in application servers, MySQL in databases, etc. Some might call it commodification, or lowering the bar. I …

Yesterday, the International PHP Conference 2005 closed its doors. So far, it was very nice to see all the people again and have some good time. Luckily, there was enough free beer at the VIP Reception and the PHP Lounge. :-) This year, we introduced some new events:

The Management Day: you know, attendees usually are not only the smaller or mid-sized companies. Mostly, companies like Deutsche Telekom, Siemens and other companies send 3-10 people from their department to this Conference to catch up with the latest hot development in the PHP scene. This year, we tried to provide a separate day fully dedicated to the topic "PHP in the Enterprise". I think we pretty much succeeded. We invited companies like T-Online (a subsidiary company of Deutsche Telekom), HypoVereinsbank (one of …

Having been somewhat concerned with MySQL 5.0 in recent posts (and the iPod now being won :)), today I'm going to be going back to looking at some of the differences between MySQL and Oracle.

Today it's the turn of output to a file from an SQL statement. Many of us old skool Oracle developers still prefer to use the good old SQL*Plus command line client, on of the reasons being that no matter where we are, be it on our desk top, on a clients site or even remotely via an ssh client we can be pretty sure a version is available. The great thing about SQL*Plus is that like the MySQL Command Line tool it's consistent across platforms, however one of the difficult things is that in it's standard mode you need to remember all manner of commands to get information to display the way you want.

But the great thing about SQL*Plus is it's easy to save the results of your SQL to a file. All you need to do is issue the following …

With some inspiration from Ben Ramsey i created a little demo for using my md5 database during the signup process on a website.

This example demonstrates the use of the MD5 database at http://md5.rednoize.com and AJAX to check password strength during signup on a website. After supplying a username and a password, a md5 hash of the password is generated using Paul Johnston's md5 javascript library.

The hash of the password (not the password itself) is then sent to http://md5.rednoize.com. If the website returns a result for the given password (hence the hash password combination is stored in the md5 database) it can be regarded as …

Call it PHPMyAdmin on steroids, or just an online database administration tool that happens to be AJAX based. TurboDbAdmin is one of the coolest AJAX based FREE application-of-the-year for MySQL database administrators. The good news, for those of you who are still using MySQL 4 or MySQL 5, is that minimum requirements for TurboDbAdmin by Turbo AJAX is MySQL 3 or higher with PHP 4 or higher installed.

Some highlights:
- Data is efficiently retrieved from the server so you don't have to wait. Columns are sortable.
- Real-time editing of table data: edits are automatically saved to your database server.
- Add, delete, backup, and rename databases. MySQL servers supported

For those of you still unfamiliar with …

Back at home and catching up with lots of things. I just uploaded the slides from my talk about "MySQL backup and Security on Linux" - you can download them as a PDF or an OpenOffice 2.0 presentation from my MySQL presentation slides page. Enjoy!

Pentaho Corporation, a company providing a full spectrum of open source Business Intelligence (BI) tools from reporting and analysis to dashboards to data mining, today announced in a press release that it's customers "now have the opportunity to gain a robust analysis platform at a remarkably low cost by utilizing open source relational databases such as MySQL together with the Pentaho On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) Server."
Mondrian project will become a permanent feature of the Pentaho Business Intelligence (BI) project. The Business Intelligence project provides comprehensive reporting, analysis, dashboards, workflow, and data mining capabilities.

Mondrian OLAP Server was initially released in 2002. According to the press release:
Mondrian OLAP Server supports the aggregation, calculation and categorization of data from standard relational …

I have been receiving many requests on writing a detailed server optimization guide. Unfortunately, at the moment I am quite busy with work. However, while I keep you guys waiting, keep watching this post as I will post some of the available MySQL and Apache optimization resources.

If you know of a good tutorial on tuning MySQL and Apache, please add it by adding your comments.

Thank you
Frank Mash

EV1 Forums: Four Primary Areas (MySQL, Apache, sysctl.conf, PHP) for Optimizing your server
Jeremy Zawodny: MySQL Tuning Advice
MySQL: MySQL Tuning and Optimization/Optimisation Tips
…

Now I want to be Sarah Lacy's biggest fan. (Eat your heart out, Dave.) Sarah politely tells me that I'm waffling on calling a spade a spade.

Or, in this case, a weak open source play a "weak open source play."

It started with the Ingres announcement, but it's really much more than that. There's a thought out there, as Sarah captures in her thoughtful blog post, that being "the open source alternative" is enough. Get out the gate first, as Dave has argued, and you win. Quoth Dave:Open source is an interesting animal in that first-mover advantage seems to …

Earlier, I reported about Google Base. Now comes an even bigger news. Search Marketing Ambassador is reporting that Peter M. Zollman, Founding Principal of Classified Intelligence said: "It's crystal clear Google is planning for an all-out move into classified advertising. These patent filings and the disclosure of Google Base a few weeks ago show the company is actively preparing to offer free listings for cars, homes, jobs and 'stuff,' even for merchants, among its services." I read a report earlier about an investment firm analyst predicting that Google Automat has huge potential. Watch out eBay and every auctions and classifieds site. Here comes Google.