Hello folks, we have just released another alpha-version of MySQL Workbench 5.2. This release now contains another couple of Administration features like “Managing your user accounts”, “Viewing your log tables”, improved start/stop scripts for remote administration (administration of remote servers is working in the mac and linux version of MySQL Workbench 5.2.6 – the windows version needs yet a bit more tweaking on that park, so that will be available in next release). Please note that 5.2.5 was an internal only release.

Head right over to our download pages and grab a copy to check out current functionality hands on. Please keep in mind, that this is still an alpha version – so do not use it on production data/servers! Also please note, MySQL Workbench files saved with version 5.2 cannot be opened with …

The future of MySQL. The SCO Group terminates Darl McBride. And more.

The future of MySQL
Monty Widenius urged Oracle to give up on MySQL in order to land Sun while Richard Stallman, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and the Open Rights Group sent a letter to the EC urging it to block Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL. All of which prompted Florian Mueller, who it should be noted is working with Widenius as part of his campaign, to claim that there is growing public opposition to Oracle owning Sun’s MySQL.

Meanwhile The VAR Guy reported on rumours that …

A controversial issue in the UK this week is the BBC’s decision to invite the British National Party - the far-right, whites-only political party - to appear on Question Time, the BBC’s flagship political debate programme.

Critics fear that the move will legitimise the BNP’s far-right views, while the BBC has defended the invitation on the grounds that its role as a politically neutral public service broadcaster would be undermined if it excluded the BNP - which won its first European Parliament seats this year with an estimated million votes.

To me it is clear that no matter how abhorrent the BNP’s policies on certain issues may be the BBC has a duty to invite it to participate as it is a legitimately recognised political party. We live in a society …

The complaints and concerns over Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems and open source MySQL database grew this week to calls for the acquisition, or at least the relatively small MySQL part of it, to be blocked. The Open Rights Group calling for such blockage was joined by none other than the father of the free software movement, Richard Stallman. However, I have to once again question how free and open are these free and open source software advocates? Is the movement and FOSS open to all (except Microsoft, Oracle or anyone else the Open Rights Group, Richard Stallman or any …

FOSDEM, the Free and Opensource Conference, will again take place in Brussels, Belgium on Saturday and Sunday (6th and 7th February, 2010). Now happening for the 10th time (congratulations!), it is one of the largest Open Source conferences in Europe, with a strong focus on developers. Sun/MySQL have been regular sponsors of and contributors to the event in the past and it is alway a great experience to be there. It's very rare to meet so many well-known and bright people from such a wide range of OSS projects.

They have now opened their Call for Participation - the organizers are seeking input on talks for the main conference tracks (deadline: 2009-11-22) , …

With IntelliJ now being available under an Open Source license, developers have another option to choose from when it comes to Java-based IDEs/Frameworks (Eclipse and NetBeans being the other two prominent ones). Choice is always good, and being an Open Source enthusiast, I of course welcome JetBrain's move!

However, as I'm not really a heavy GUI-based IDE user myself, I can't really comment on which one is the best. These kind of discussions tend to turn into a Holy War anyway... In the end it's likely that each of them gets the job done and you have to come to your own conclusions, based on your personal preference and requirements.

I personally would be interested in …

When I was younger and had lots of free time, I used to do video editing as a hobby. At that time I developed a rule that is true for many projects in general (it was also true for writing a book some years later). The rule is: When you think you are 90% done, you are only 50% done. With video-editing, this meant that when the video was more or less ready, you are still 50% away from the final goal of actually having a master copy on tape. The latter 50% would be spent on checking ending credits, watching through the video a couple of times, and in those time, rendering even simplest of effects. Using a Windows PC for video editing was in those times a shaky effort in itself, so even when mastering you had to sit there and watch through the whole tape to make sure there were no glitches.

Producing a MariaDB release has been a similar process. In our company meeting in August we were discussing "final steps" to produce a final Beta, …

My recent poll What alert monitoring do you use? showed 25% of the 58 respondents to bravely state they had no MySQL monitoring. I see 1 in 3, ~33% in my consulting so this is consistent.

There is no excuse to not have some MySQL Monitoring on your production system. At the worse case, you should be logging important MySQL information for later analysis. I use my own Logging and Analyzing scripts on every client for an immediate assessment regardless of what’s available. I combine that with my modified statpack to give me immediate text based analysis, broken down by hour chunks for quick reference. These help me in troubleshooting, but they are …

Larry Ellison promises funds for MySQL, commits to community. The “open source vendor” debate in a nutshell. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Larry Ellison promised MySQL will receive more money for development and research, while Oracle maintained that it is committed to Java and open source developer communities.

# GroundWork raised $5m series D funding from Canaan Partners, Mayfield, JAFCO Ventures and SAP Ventures.

# InformationWeek reported that Motorola has vacated …

I like profilers. I use them when trying to make software (such as Drizzle) faster. Many profilers suck – and pretty much all of them are impossible to attach to a running system. Two notable exceptions are oprofile and dtrace (for Linux and Solaris respectively). The downside of oprofile is that it is non trivial to configure and get running and is pretty much all or nothing. Dtrace has the major disadvantage of that it is Solaris specific, so is only available to a minority of our users (and developers).

The new Linux Performance Events interface (perf_event) presents to userspace a nice abstraction of the hardware Performance Monitoring Unit inside the CPU. Typically these are processor specific (i.e. the one in a Core is different than the one in a Core 2) and can only be used by one thing at a time. The perf_events interface lets multiple applications/threads use the PMU (switching state at context switch as needed), even giving us …