Go read over on Baldy’s (my father and SmugMug’s co-founder) blog for the details.  Leave a comment there and who knows?  You might have an iPad headed your way.  :)

The main reason for that VFP to MYSQL conversion project was that the customer is in the process of growth and is establishing multiple locations which all will use the same system to some extend. In addition to that we are going from a system where everyone on the system did pretty much everything to one where there are only going to be a few people who have access to everything and most will just work in their “special corner” of the system. Some will just do order entry, some receivables, some sales personel will have only access to their clients etc etc.

At present the VFP system resides on a shared Network drive and if a modification is needed well then one just replaces or adds a Screen or report on that particular shared network drive. Now it would be necessary to push this to multiple locations, in different configurations and that shared network drive wont do anymore – especially over the internet.

Luckely all …

I started with my VFP to MYSQL conversion in earnest at the end of December. To keep the cost down until I know what I am doing I am using the GA version 5.1.43 and now WORKBENCH to do my development. Actually initially I used the 5.0 Administrator and Query which worked fine but did not have any supports for triggers. Workbench 5.1.18 frustrated me for many reasons so I started to use the Beta of 5.2 which in my opinion is better but still a Beta. Trying to help to improve I filed about 20 or so bug reports and got into email conversations with the developers.

In course of that I mentioned the process of converting from VFP (Visual Foxpro) to MYSQL and I was asked to Blog about my experiences with that and feed it to Planet MySQL. Starting to read Planet MySQL I must say that I am probably an oddity here as there does not seem to be any VFP people here. For that reason I also fed and anounced my Blog to some VFP boards and feeds. I even got …

I would like to use this installment of my blog to show some differences between VFP and MYSQL on how problems need to be solved. On the top it seems to me that the MYSQL optimizer needs a quite different strategy and some more help then the “rushmore” one in VFP. There is probably some room for improvements left in both approaches but I usually stop optimizing when I get under 2 seconds on getting results.

The task was to roll back the AR aging to a prior date. Basically a standard business problem. Accounting comes, looks at last months aging, makes some adjustments and then wants to rerun the aging, or the bank wants it as of a particular date or things just went nuts and everyone was busy with … whatevever …. and did not get to run the aging at the proper time. So to handle this a query was devised to back out all invoices and applications as to a certain date.

In the late 80’s the customer got and SBT accounting …

I will be doing two talks at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara CA.
Performance Schema Tuesday April 13, 11:55am.
Demos Of All The Big New Features Thursday April 15, 11:55am, with Konstantin Osipov.

The other MySQL server engineers giving talks are:
Alexander Barkov (globalization)
Chuck Bell (backup)
Mattias Jonsson (partitions)
…

We have at least four birthdays here at SmugMug.  I started working on the first lines of code for the project, which was decidedly not a photo-sharing site at the time, in October of 2001.  Then in August of 2002, we decided to shift gears and build a photo-sharing site “as a side business.”  Finally, we launched SmugMug and signed up our first paying customers in November of 2002.

But as far as the government is concerned, February 27th, 2002, is the day we were born.  It’s our official incorporation date and probably marks the day I finally wore my father’s resolve down enough that he agreed to come on board.  :)  (Which, incidentally, is also the best decision I’ve made running this company).

So Happy Birthday SmugMug!  You’re 8!

Here’s to many more profitable, independent, customer- and employee-focused years!

…

(This post was written at my old location.  You’re now reading it at the new location. )

I’m in the process of moving my blog to hosted WordPress at WordPress.com. Much as I loved the flexibility of hosting my own blog (and the rest of the company), the upkeep required just isn’t worth the extra flexibility. So my customization will go away, which is sad, but I should have to spend less time managing all the blogs at SmugMug. Which might mean I actually blog more often again.

Here’s the new URL in ‘beta’ form: http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/

I should have redirects up shortly, so everything should work fine, but if your feed reader breaks or something, now you know why. Apologies in advance for any hiccups…

And, of course, I …

Just a note that my personal blog resides on lentz.com.au/blog/

The story is this… I first started my blog when at MySQL AB, the Community Relations gig. It was a mix of personal and MySQL-related stuff, and hosted at LiveJournal. Last year we managed to migrate all the LiveJournal data to the Open Query blog instance, but naturally there it’s not really suitable to write about non-OQ stuff. So I’ve cloned that instance and am deleting the posts that are really only OQ/MySQL-related. Some business/development topics that refer to MySQL as an example will stay.

In any case, this allows me to scribble about my (bio)diesel car, gardening, cooking, bushwalking and all that without bothering the Open Query blog readers Those of you who are interested can subscribe to both. Easy!

In a time when many tradeshows are experiencing lower then normal attendance the 8th Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 8x) had record attendance this past weekend in Los Angeles. I was there exhibiting and conducting a community training day for Zenoss and was very impressed by not only the quality of the program but the enthusiasm of the attendees.

Here are some of the highlights:

The Mini Conferences

On the Friday before the main SCaLE expo and speaking program starts many people hold …

With the motivation from today’s public news on Twitter’s move from MySQL to Cassandra, my own skills desire following in-depth discussions at last November’s Open SQL Camp to consider Cassandra and yesterday’s discussion with a new client on persistent key-value store products, today I download installed and configured for the first time. Not that today’s news was unexpected, if you follow the Twitter Engineering Open Source projects you would have seen Cassandra as well as other products being used or evaluated by Twitter.

So I went from nothing to a …