In addition to the binary downloads that we provide from our site, Linux RPM builds of the MySQL Proxy (both the latest stable version as well as SVN snapshot releases, named mysql-proxy-snapshot) are now available for download from the server:/database repository of the openSUSE build service. It provides packages for a number of Linux distributions, e.g. Fedora 5/6, SLES 9/10 SuSE/openSUSE 10.x. By the way, this repository also contains RPMs of the current 5.0.45 MySQL Community Server for the distributions mentioned above. Thanks a lot to Darix for the initial checkin of the proxy package!

I've returned home safely from my trip to St. Augustin, Germany (near to Bonn), where I attended this year's FrOSCon. As last year, it was a very well organized event, kudos and thanks to the conference organizers (who are all volunteers!). The conferece program was packed with good sessions again and the ones I attended were interesting and well done. Many OSS projects also exhibited in the hall way, it was nice to stop by and chat with these folks.

I gave a talk about "Opening the doors (and windows) of the Cathedral - Enabling an architecture of participation around the MySQL Server", which describes the ongoing activity at MySQL to open up the development processes to the Community. Given that I gave this talk for the first time, I think it went very well, at least I did not run out of time The slides are …

Hmm, long time no post! But I have the perfect excuse: I've actually been on vacation the past two weeks... Now I am back at work and busy trying to make a dent in the mail pile that has accumulated while I was gone. In addition to that, I am assisting with the organization of our MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg, which will take place in September. See Kaj's blog post for more details about it. I am in charge of our community guests and really look forward to meeting most of our internal developers as well as community guests there! This is going to be a fun event.

In addition to that, I am applying the final touches to my upcoming presentation about our ongoing community activities: "Opening the doors (and windows) of the Cathedral", which will be held at the …

I am happy to announce that my MySQL Dev Zone interview with David Axmark just went live - if you are curious to hear a few stories about how David and Monty started this whole thing more than 10 years ago, make sure to spend a few minutes and read it here!

Some say Sun is as cool as OSCon (if not cooler) because, among most companies that support OSCon, only Sun can produce truly underground notes on OSCon.

David Van Couvering reviews Mike Olson's comments about his keynote at OSCon and pontificates about whether the value of Open Source could be limited to the collaboration it fosters. David aptly notes that

Open source and an open community gives you the assurance that the technology you are depending on is not going to be discontinued or put into "maintenance mode," it won't be acquired by someone who you would rather not do business with, and it won't be used as leverage against you to extract money or modify your behavior.

By way of further review, David contrasts MySQL as an Open Source project to …

Just a quick heads-up - I just commited a change to the Planet MySQL code that slightly modifies how the RSS feed is being created: now the author name is put in front of each posting's title, similar to how many other feed aggregators mark the different articles. I hope you find this change useful, let me know if you experience any problems or have any other suggestions for improvements. Thanks!

Today, I again spent about an hour to revert changes made by spambots on various MySQL Forge Wiki pages. As I was really sick of this, I now installed a new plugin: reCAPTCHA - this will hopefully raise the bar for spambots to create new user accounts automatically for spamming the Wiki. If you are a registered user already, you will probably not notice the change - by default, CAPTCHAs are only displayed on the following events:

• New user registration
• Anonymous edits that contain new external links
• Brute-force password cracking

Let's hope it helps! Please let me know if you still experience spam problems on the Wiki.

I'd like to bring two announcements to your attention, that I posted to our internals Mailing list a few days ago - both refer to ongoing activities at MySQL AB to further open up our development processes and to establish an Architecture of Participation around the MySQL Server and related applications.

I am excited to be able to talk about this topic at the upcoming FrOSCon, which will take place on August, 25th-26th in Sankt Augustin, Germany. The title of my presentation will be "Opening the doors of the Cathedral - Enabling an architecture of participation around the MySQL Server". Here's the abstract:

Even though the MySQL Server is released and distributed as Open Source Software (OSS) under the GPL, the development itself so far has mostly …

For the curious, the slides for the eLiberatica 2007 presentations are now up at http://eliberatica.ro/2007/ - the slides include presentations from eZ CEO Aleksander Farstad, Brian Behlendorf, FSF Europe President Georg Greve, Ubuntist Kurt von Finck and MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius (and yours truly, but the slides are a bit weak - check out my …

While MySQL already provides some functionality to store and operate on geospatial data, the functionality leaves quite a lot to be desired and is far from providing full OpenGIS compatibility. Most notably is that all functions that query spatial data only operate on MBRs (minimum bounding rectangles), to simplify the operations.

Thanks to my colleague Alexey "Holyfoot" Botchkov from Izhevsk, Russia, some of the spatial relation functions like INTERSECTS and WITHIN now work in the way they are described by OpenGIS and not by using MBR's as it used to be. He has been working on improving the GIS functionality as a side project and the work has now reached a level at which he is ready to give it some public …