So the blogosphere seems to be in an uproar regarding what constitutes an "open source company" and what doesn't. This seems to have been spawned by a blog post by Nat Torkington. While working on the OSCON program he stumbled over what he deems as questionable entries, since he does not feel the relevant backing companies are sufficiently "open source".

Overall I agree that there is a fine balance. Now that open source has become so "posh" there are a lot people on the bandwagon that are just there for the ride and not to enable it. Obviously any company is in it for the money on some level. Personally, I am also not a follower of the open source as a political cause. With these two points as a baseline lets explore the topic some more.

To me the point of open source is to enable better software for everybody. The idea is that as I work …

I’ll be speaking at the upcoming 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo (Why they dropped the word User, who knows), this time with Guy Harrison (Author of many books including MySQL Stored Procedures). We will be talking on MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers.

Anyway, good friend Paul McCullagh, creator of PBXT will be also speaking on PrimeBase XT: Design and Implementation of a Transactional Storage Engine. He coined to me in an email “CU at the UC”. I’ve done a further level of refactoring, and added marketing. You …

So I am not much of a C hacker .. I never really got into pointers and stuff like that. PHP is so nice and easy. However I still want to give back to C based OSS projects I care about. A while ago I setup a wiki to track todo items for up coming PHP releases and other release related information. The page sees varying activity, but I think its helped Ilia a little bit for his 5.x releases. Its not that relevant for Derick's work on the 4.4.x branch, as that one is about bug fixing and not feature additions. Where I am really hoping it will make a big impact is with PHP 6. I am hoping that the list of todo items will assist in making sure that the next major version of PHP is all around …

At a customer site recently I came across the following table definition for an Innodb table. 140 columns, 3 part primary key totally 44 bytes, 2 million rows giving over 900MB in data size. And it had 15 indexes, totaling over 2.3GB in size. Add into the mix a Windows Server 2003 OS, 640MB innodb_buffer_pool_size setting and table scans out the warzoo. This all leads to very poor performance.

In is generally considered best practice for Innodb to use the shortest primary key as possible, and there is a clear reason for this. Innodb stores with every index the full primary key. So for example if an indexed column was 4 bytes in length, in this example the index row would be 48 bytes (before overhead). Fortunately an easy solution presented itself, because of this index storage requirement, Innodb will create an internal 6 byte primary key if none exists for a table. I of course had known about this but had never tried it in a production …

I have blogged about meeting up with Georg, Peter, Andrey and Ulf in Frankfurt last November to discuss the mysqlnd project. What is mysqlnd you may ask? You can find an answer in the FAQ section of the newly released mysqlnd project page on mysql.com. However, for the lazy reader I will briefly say what it is about

The idea behind the mysqlnd is to leverage the PHP infrastructure in order to communicate with the MySQL server. As such it is a replacement for libmysql and just like libmysql it can be used in any PHP extension. So while currently the reference implementation is done inside ext/mysqli, it is pretty certain that ext/pdo_mysql will also make use of mysqlnd eventually.

Now why would we care? One boring, yet important aspect, is that mysqlnd will be licensed under the PHP …

Technocation, Inc has a list of where you can get MySQL binaries — official and unofficial — up at:

http://tinyurl.com/3anjfa

From: http://tinyurl.com/299h29

Oracle Updates Free SQL Developer Tools
Oracle Corp. has released the first major upgrade to SQL Developer, its free visual database development tool. The new version can browse non-Oracle databases, including Microsoft SQL Server and Access and MySQL AB?s open-source MySQL. The SQL Developer 1.1 tool simplifies the creation and debugging of code in standard SQL and in Oracle?s proprietary PL/SQL programming languages.

Roland Bouman has an excellent blog post on it:
http://rpbouman.blogspot.com/2007/01/oracle-sql-developer-11-supports-mysql.html

This person dreamed that they were trying to compile part of Firefox, and the compile button was actually the snooze button on the alarm clock. I experienced a similar dream years ago: I dreamt I was a debugger, and this breakpoint kept firing (the breakpoint turned out to be my alarm clock).

Anyone else had dreams that you were a computer? Or a MySQL storage engine? Or a compiler?

lca2007 already totally rocks.

did the speaker thing this morning, which was awesome (and i won’t spoil the surprise)

mysql miniconf today, should rock.

Two weeks into the New Year, and four weeks since I got back from Thailand, I finally get round to updating this thing. By “updating”, I don’t just mean posting. Gojira the One-Lung Webserver has had an overhaul as well: I’ve added some more RAM, caught up with the last couple of months’ worth of Windows 2000 patches, updated to the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, WordPress, and Cygwin. (Tip: If you’re running PHP and MySQL on Windows, be sure to get rid of the libMySQL.dll that comes with PHP — because it’s crap — and to use the version that comes with MySQL instead.)

So… 2006 was a pretty decent year, with a number of positive changes:

• I got to see my daughter grow up some more. She’s just more amazing every time I see her.
• I got out of the hell-hole of a house that I’d lived in for 3 years. I must admit that I had some mixed emotions about that. I’d lived there …