A couple of weeks ago Sphinx Technologies, a company behind Sphinx Full Text Search Engine launched Sphinx Support Packages which I think is a great value for everyone using Sphinx in Production. This is also a great way to support the project and get something in return - even if you're not actively using support it looks better than donation for accounting people.

The Support approach was closely modeled from MySQL Support of the early days - simple service lever differentiation with no per server pricing or different editions. This is exactly how I think Support for Open Source project should be structured. Of course such service offering may be lacking the "leverage" but how much leverage do you really need if you do not have sales and marketing teams or venture capitalists to feed? If money you pay go …

At this year's CeBit 2009 trade fair, there was a dedicated exhibition area called the Open Source Forum. In addition to providing booths for various Open Source projects, they also had a stage for presentations about different topics. Every talk was recorded and available as a live stream during the show.

My dear colleague Simon Phipps spoke about "Adoption-Led: The Third Wave of Open Source" on Wednesday, I gave a presentation about "MySQL Backup and Security Best Practices" on Friday. The recording of these and all other talks as well as the Linux New Media Award ceremony are now available from the archives. Enjoy!

The web is going the way of utf8.  Drizzle has chosen it as the default character set, most back-ends to websites use it to store text data, and those who are still using latin1 have begun to migrate their databases to utf8.  Googling for "mysql convert charset to utf8" results in a plethora of sites, each with a slightly different approach, and each broken in some respect.  I'll outline those approaches here and show why they don't work, and then present a script that can generically be used to convert a database (or set of tables) to a target character set and collation.

Approach #1:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. ALTER TABLE `t1` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Take the following table as an example why this approach will not work:

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Following our plan to release the MySQL Workbench 5.1 Beta1 later this week we have uploaded a last Alpha build for Ubuntu and the Mac for you to check for serious issues. The following binaries will not be published on our official download site but are only available trought the following links.

Please join us in our #workbench IRC channel on freenode to discuss issues or simply leave a comment here.

ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/gui-tools/mysql-workbench-oss-5.1.8-1-alpha-i386.deb

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Tomás Muller escreveu um excelente post em português sobre o uso do MySQL Workbench na modelagem de uma aplicação. Para quem prefere ter informações em português, esta é uma boa introdução a ferramenta e seu usoAtualização: URL corrigida

After checking with the relevant parties, MySQL has just submitted an application for the Google Summer of Code 2009. We’ve successfully participated in SoC during 2007, and 2008, and we’re hoping to get another shot at SoC, for our third year running.

What is Summer of Code? It means different things to many different people. If you’re a student, it means you get to hack on MySQL and the related products, and churn out code, that over eleven million people use, while you sit on the beach in your bathers! And when successful, you get a nice wad of cash even!

If you’re a mentor, it means having someone to help you write features, you’ve been wanting — someone to spend a good fourty-hours per week, hacking …

I’ve been talking to device manufacturers and the Linux-centered software providers that feed them code for mobile phones, TV set-top boxes, industrial control, automotive technology, medical devices, military uses and a slew of other categories commonly classified as embedded devices, and I can definitively report that I am not hearing or sensing any fear, uncertainty or doubt (FUD) as a result of Microsoft’s TomTom patent suit.

I wrote last month that the controversial MS TomTom suit was not aimed at Linux as much as TomTom and some market categories for Microsoft. While we must all remind ourselves that anything may be possible considering court rulings and Microsoft strategies, I don’t see Microsoft’s TomTom suit as truly aimed at Linux. If it is, I don’t see it having much, if any, impact on Linux. …

Even though we haven't yet gotten a schedule online, we're still accepting proposals for the Percona Performance Conference.

As a teaser, let me just share one accepted proposal with you: Cary Millsap. If you are even vaguely involved with Oracle, you should know who he is. He is one of the world's foremost authorities on Oracle performance. Cary will be giving a technology-agnostic session on Performance Instrumentation Beyond What You Do Now. Don't miss this one.

But that's only the beginning; there's a lot more to come. There are good …

Version 1.0.3-alpha of the MySQL Connector/C++ has just been announced by Lawrin Novitsky and is now available for download. This driver is licensed under the GPL and is a new implementation of the MySQL Client/Server protocol. Instead of wrapping the C API calls in C++ methods, the implementation mimics the JDBC API, which hopefully feels much more "native" to a seasoned C++ developer.

The driver has been ported to a wide range of platforms and is about to hit the beta test phase. So if you're writing a C++ application that needs to connect to a MySQL Server, give it a try! The developers are always looking for …