The March (pun!) continues. Bill Boebel, CTO of Mailtrust (Rackspace’s mail division), saw my previous announcement and asked me to present CouchDB as part of their Racklabs series and I happily agreed. This is a very cool opportunity to meet a bunch of very smart engineers; I am eager to go.

On Monday 17th (St. Patrick’s Day) at 6pm Eastern Time, we meet at Mailtrust’s office. See the announcement for directions and details. There will be pizza and beer afterwards. The talk is open …

I often get accused, especially by my European friends, of not being a true geek for two reasons: I don't carry an expensive camera with me at all times — nice Fisheye lens, Kaj! — and because I don't indulge in video games. Well, for all you Jay-ain't-a-true-geekers out there, I offer two photos today to prove my geekhood.

As some of you know, I live in Columbus, Ohio, with 2 dogs, 2 cats, and my lovely wife Julie. Last night, we got hammered with the most snow we've seen in March in over 40 years. By my estimation, there is about 18 inches of snow on the ground. The photo to the right was taken this morning, while the snow was still coming down, from my back door. You can see my garage and the ground covered in snow, but the most telling part of the photo is the amount of snow on the table on our back deck. …

No, its not alphabet soup. Just some notes from the session at the Sun Tech Days. I’ve not looked at DTrace much (my only look into instrumentation, has been from SystemTap, which doesn’t deal with applications), but plan on doing so soon… I’ve managed to get OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 installed in VirtualBox, so it can only start being more fun from here…

Want to learn more about DTrace and MySQL? Then come to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, in Santa Clara, California, because on Thursday, Ben Rockwood, from Joyent, will be presenting a session on DTrace and MySQL (read the abstract, its good). The talk covers the fact that you can get useful information currently, …

I'm talking at the MySQL User Conference once again this year presenting my Code Generators for MySQL Plugins and User Defined Functions in a formal session this time after my original "pizza & hacking" session on this topic on the 2006 UC (which ended up in hacking some other things on the way first ... photographs may follow ...).

The plugin and UDF code generators are based on the same foundation as my "pecl-gen" generator for PHP extensions so this might be of interest for hardcore PHP folks, too.

For more information see the Conference Schedule.

JavaScript? Check. Ajax? Check. “Beta” tag? Check. Bright colors? Check. Big fonts? Check. Rounded corners? Check*.

In a fit of “someone really ought to have made such a tool already” and wanting to play a bit with Javascript and DOM, I humbly present my Web 2.0 - compliant MySQL DATE_FORMAT() and PHP DATE() tool.

Not very fancy or anything, but it should go some way toward saving you the effort of looking up formatting codes and running your scripts for the nth time to check whether things work or not.

Any and all suggestions for improvements are appreciated!

Since well before I joined MySQL in 2001, I have had contact with now-members of the four-headed management team of Germany’s top-notch PHP experts and solution providers Mayflower GmbH.

Mayflowers and MySQLers frequently pop into each other at PHP conferences and other Open Source events, and meet informally under various circumstances ranging from Christmas parties to Biergarten discussions. It’s always interesting to exchange thoughts on virtual companies, Open Source, business models, IRC, scrum, and finding developers (some of which have worked for both MySQL and Mayflower, incidentally). And by sheer coincidence, Mayflower’s Munich headquarters is now about 150 metres from where I live, in the same street that I look out at from my home office (Mannhardtstr.). This time, they copied us, though — I …

Debugging an existing application can be hard to bootstrap. Sometimes it just helps to observe the queries a web application is sending to the database. Unfortunately, the MySQL Query log does not directly tell the user which query goes to which database.
Continue reading "Observing the MySQL Query Log"

Like I said my last post, the new MySQL Forge commenting system is pretty slick. It gives commenters a lot of freedom in how they wish to display their comments, including syntax-highlighted code sections, while at the same time being security-conscious about XSS attacks and such. The HTMLPurifier and GeSHi PHP libraries are used in tandem to give flexibility and security at the same time.

The code to enable this is fairly short. For you PHP devs out there, here is the code that does everything for cleaning and "codifying" the comments:

1. /**
2.   * Highlights the text as code in the supplied language
3.   *
4.   * @return string The marked up code
5.   * @param subject The text to markup
6.   * @param …

As anyone close to me can attest, my life over the past six months or so has revolved consistently around planning for the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo. However, in my abundant free time not reviewing proposals, working with sponsors, and organizing the conference events, I've also been working on a new version of the MySQL Forge platform. In fact, the new code base is almost a complete rewrite from the original one. I'm pretty pleased with the new platform, and Giuseppe and I have been doing a bunch of testing to get things to where they are now. And we'd like your help in the final testing of Forge 2.0 before it hits the mean streets of the Internet.

So, what exactly is new about Forge 2.0? Well, lots of things actually. …

Today there was a recent flurry of blog posts, starting with Charles Babcock's interview of Jonathan Schwartz about Sun's strategy of targeting Web 2.0 developers. This brought to light an interesting topic about open source development communities, the perceived insularity of Sun towards the external OpenSolaris developer community, and why Linux will apparently always be more popular and technically stronger than OpenSolaris.

The initial interview led Amanda McPherson of the Linux Foundation to take issue, and long comments on those posts from …