PHP has been used in the business for years. In fact, we and many other companies provided business-critical solutions based on PHP (or LAMP) for several years now. Magazines like PHP Magazin or web sites like PHP-Center.de or Dynamic-Webpages.de, not forgetting the world's first PHP Conference that took place here in Germany provided the fruitful ground for a market that continously attracted larger businesses searching for a fast, reliable and easy-to-deploy solution for their critical business processes.

General IT magazines like iX or …

Oracle software has always been free to develop with, however to deploy you have to buy a license and for web apps, it could never be limited to users, it was limited to CPU’s and that was expensive. Well now that have released
Oracle 10g Express Edition. A free little brother to Oracle 10g Enterprise. The software I understand is identical in the base sense, with a cut back set of additional features, and limitations to CPU/Memory/Disk usage. So providing your application, or applications all on one server never reach these limits you will be fine, but if overtime your product grows or database grows you may get caught out.

Still it’s not open source, but it is FREE, and for old Oracle people such as myself, a huge benefit as it keeps my skills a little more up to date.

How do I rate it. Well if …

Just a note, while MySQL provide a list of Version 5 Features (Official Data Sheet), I’ve so far found a few small things.

mysql> DESC [table], the Null column now shows NO when it was blank

When you grant ALL to a user, it’s gets CREATE VIEW privilege, but when upgrading, you have to manually specify the privilege for previous users that had grant ALL>

Some OUTER JOINS no longer work

Today I (finally) got my Solaris 10 x86 server from Sun.

This is one of those lower-end x64 “Ultra 20″ machines that they were “giving away” if you purchased a 3 year support contract. My intention has been to make it my primary work/development machine, so with that in mind I have been messing around with it today, trying to get accustomed to the OS (Solaris not being an OS I have ever used very much at all) and spending time figuring out how I can continue doing the things I do under Linux.

A quick review, from the perspective of someone who is effectively a “first time Sun customer":

The machine itself is interesting looking, though plain. Better than a white box, but no SGI. (No Sun either, for that matter, compared to the appearance of their higher-end machines. You get what you pay for.)

The first thing you notice after plugging it up and turning it on is that there is no useful hardcopy …

The Call for Papers for the MySQL Users Conference 2006 (April 24-27, Santa Clara CA) is still open, but not for much longer! We've received many excellent submissions already, but if you are eager to present your skills, killer apps or tools, this is a fab opportunity!

You only need to submit a brief abstract that makes it clear what the subject of your proposed talk is, the target audience (developers, DBAs, managers, etc) and the level (anything from beginner to uberguru). So it shouldn't cost you a great deal of time to put something together. The real homework comes later, if your submission gets accepted!

Don't wait - or you'll be too late...

Matt Asay and the OSBC team put on a great conference in Boston the last two days.  I was skeptical that there would be enough people to warrant an east coast venue, but there were more than 400 people including a range of new emerging technology companies, investors, CIOs and IP lawyers.  (Unabashed lawyer joke: Remember, every healthy ecosystem has parasites!) 

There were three parallel tracks during most of the time (Emerging Trends, IT Executive, Intellectual Property) so it was sometimes tough chosing which sessions to attend.  There were also lots of impromptu meetings with various MySQL partners like Alfresco, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Pentaho, Intel, JBoss, Zimbra, Zend and others and sometimes that got in the way of a session I really wanted to attend.  And it probably would have been rude to leave the panel I was moderating in order to check out the email session on the CIO track. 

Thanks to all …

Since I read the excellent article MySQL Wizardry by Giuseppe Maxia some years ago I wanted to implement crosstabs in pure MySQL - and had to wait a long time until 5.0 made it possible. And then of course I didn't find the time. But after Roland Bouman blogged on this same topic yesterday, it was definitely the right moment to try out the real thing: Fully dynamic crosstabs in a pure MySQL stored procedure.

If you're new to crosstabs make sure you read the article mentioned above first. It's likewise instructive and witty. What I do here in pure SQL is actually just a translated and slightly simplified version of Giuseppe Maxia's …

I hereby award the following Slashdot comment my ‘MySQL Bash of the Week’ award:

Ya especially for a database with such bad design. MySQL can’t even nest tables like HTML can, so I think I’ll stick with HTML until MySQL improves a lot. Besides, with CSS you can make HTML look great, but last time I looked at MySQL it was just weird blue with some sailboat in the corner and you couldn’t change it.

Looks like we at MySQL AB have some work to do…

One of the really cool things about working for MySQL AB is that most of us work from home, and from anywhere on the planet. We could hire a good developer living in Antarctica, provided they have ADSL ;-)
Sure, there are challenges - you really need to use all the communication methods available to stay in touch with your colleagues, and also make sure you get out enough and interact with the real world.

The great thing about working from home... well I have a 5 month old daughter. It's fab to just be around and see her, even when I work. Yesterday was a really nice hot spring day (yes it's spring in Australia), so I actually took a couple of hours off so that we could take Phoebe for her first swim at the local swimming pool. Such flexibility is a great perk to have.

I actually have MySQL swimming togs (the local Aussie word for swimwear), from our 2003 Budapest (Hungary) staff meeting.
Ahyes, interesting …