I recently was interviewed by Packt Publishing for their Impackt '08 web pages:

Ever since the formal adoption of the term in 1998, Open Source has experienced growth and adoption rates that defy pressures and suggestions that it’s a viable option for enthusiasts and geeks only. Governments, corporations as well as small businesses have begun to choose Open Source over proprietary software. However, with the global economy facing an uncertain future, how will open source be impacted? Can it continue to grow despite this?

With these questions in mind and more, Packt approached some people at the heart of this movement to understand their take on the future of open source.

The …

A bit late in the game, but maybe somebody would be interested in working on this proposed project of mine:

PlanetMySQL currently is merely an aggregator of submitted RSS feeds, with some functionality for filtering content to keep the discussion on topic. Due to its high volume of posts, many gems get "lost in the noise" and are hard to retrieve.

We'd like to expand the functionality of PlanetMySQL significantly to provide more possibilities for community participation and interaction. For this project, we are looking for a talented PHP hacker to set up a site that provides the current functionality and more:

• Voting on articles/blog postings: it must be possible for logged in users to cast a vote on articles, similar to the …

Now that the GA (General Availability) release of MySQL Workbench is coming up it is a good point in time to discuss what the commercial Standard Edition subscription will be all about and what will be covered by it. While I am not a lawyer I will try to explain the ideas behind the concept. Please make sure to read the subscription details when you get it.

Key points:

• USD 99
• Single seat license (license packs for a large number of seats (>30) possible)
• Software never expires
• Includes all updates of Standard Edition for a full year

The Basics

After the official launch you will be able to buy subscriptions in the MySQL Online Shop. Apart from payment with standard credit cards it has been updated to also allow for PayPal payment. A subscription will cost USD 99 (good for people in Euro countries, I know) and is valid for a single seat. If you are a bigger …

A gentle reminder: next week, there will be two more stops of the MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour:

• Monday, April 7th, 19:00: Hamburg, Germany. We will meet in the meeting rooms of the local Sun Microsystems offices ( Nagelsweg 55, 22097 Hamburg). There will be two technical sessions: Giuseppe will talk about the MySQL Sandbox, Kay Koll will give a presentation about how to combine MySQL with OpenOffice.org. He will also describe the new report generator and give an overview over the future of OpenOffice. You can register for this event via meetup.com or …

Recently I acquired Sesame Street Volume 1, and on the third DVD in the set I came across one of my favorite Sesame Street songs: “Who are the people in your neighborhood?”

Here’s a sample of one such skit, if you are not familiar with it, or if you want a bit of nostalgia http://youtube.com/watch?v=B9lpUjQvToY (note, play will likely start automatically, so tune your volume appropriately before clicking).

The refrain is “Who are the people in your neighborhood? The people that you meet each day!” I live in a city of 34,000 people just 6 miles northwest of Boston, MA. I know exactly one neighbor, across the street, whom we met because I sent my husband over to get her live band to stop playing loud music at her party at 2 am. I do not know many of the local business owners. I do not know who lives in my neighborhood, yet people live around me. Saying I …

Past Tuesday we had our 5th Belgian MySQL meetup with around 12 attendees, and it was great! I hoped for a large audience, but the spirits were good and we had some fun and good chats. I started out giving a brief history of MySQL and ending with Sun buying us. Important was to get the message out which Kaj explained us last week in Munich (Germany).

The main topic was Performance Tuning best practices, but I didn't go intensively deep on it. This is something we should do again in a large group and just that presentation.
After that, we talked about communities and more importantly growing a PHP UserGroup in Belgium. Michelangelo and Felix are really doing great and it's probably going to be a hit. I, and probably the whole MySQL Community team, would definitely like to help out to get it started.

I had some people commenting about doing these meetups during the day, during working hours. Yes, this would be nice, …

As Kaj already pointed out, the Sun/MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour will also make a stop in Munich, Germany this Friday. I will be there as well, we will meet at 14:00 at the Hilton Munich Park Hotel. Kaj and some other Sun people will join us a bit later. If you are in the area, make sure to stop by!

By the way, the Meetup Mashup Tour will make at least one more stop in Germany - I am organizing an event in Hamburg, Germany which will take place on Monday, April 7th (19:00). This was initially planned as another regular MySQL Meetup, but I offered to expand the scope a bit. We will now meet at the Sun offices, Sun will sponsor some food and drinks! In addition to …

As I listened to today’s OpenNMS and Hyperic HyperCAST, it occurred to me that I haven’t posted a couple of previous archives. Which is a shame, because there have been some great ones.

HyperCAST 8 was all about upgrading to Hyperic HQ 3.2.x. It includes some live demos of upgrades in action, and covers upgrades for bundles, separate databases, and separate JRE’s.

HyperCAST 9 was Hyperic en espanol - and it was conducted completely in Spanish.

Enjoy! And remember, you can always register for upcoming HyperCASTs and view archives at hyperic.com/demo/hypercasts.html

With the great help we receive from community and SE Beta testers we are marching towards RC quality with large steps. This week we hope to remove the last obstacles (mostly printing, some canvas problems and some synchronization problems) that are holding us back and to be able to close all open P1 & P2 bugs. If we achieve all this we will upload the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) build.

As a bonus we have now added the much requested “direct connection” notation between columns (better know as MS Access style notation) to the Standard Edition - a feature that has been requested since the old DBDesigner4 days. Personally, I am not so found of this notation because it limits the connection points to the left and right of the individual PK- and FK-columns which makes it harder to have a nice looking model. But given the flexibility of Workbench to hold an unlimited number of smaller diagrams this might solve this problem for most I hope.

Last week at CeBit I once again had a conversation with an application developer that was not aware that it's possible to embed the MySQL Server inside an application instead of running it as a separate process. I experienced something similar at FOSDEM recently, while talking with the Amarok developers - how come that this feature is so little known? In fact, there are two possibilities for embedding MySQL (and both of them are licensed under the GPL): the first one is using the libmysqld embedded library, which is suitable if you are developing C/C++ applications:

The embedded MySQL server library makes it possible to run a full-featured MySQL server inside a client application. The main benefits are …