The latest from the MySQL community

“Reminders work. At least on me.” I confessed in my previous CfP posting.

Well, guess what also works on me? Deadline extensions! I aim at making most (ehh, all) deadlines, but at times, I fail. And I have observed similar behaviour in others.

And therefore we have extended our CfP to 5 November 2008 (all fellow Europeans out there: “midnight 11/05/2008 PST” looks like mid May, but isn’t).

Some key points:

1. We’re looking at high quality presentations
2. We’re looking at innovation, i.e. *new* things
3. We’re looking at covering main areas of MySQL …

I’d say I normally don’t respond to idiots… but I think we all know that’s a lie. Our fine friends at Slashdot pointed out an “interesting” article which opines that the downturning Economy to Give Open-Source a Good Thumping. There’s a bit in the middle that points out that people still don’t get it.

The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

The disconnect seems to continue to be an idea that we’re doing the Free Software in hopes that it might turn a profit one day. The people who share this disconnect seem to think Free Software is a “gimmick” of some sort.

I have uploaded prebuilt binaries of Q4M for MySQL 5.1.28-rc to http://q4m.31tools.com/dist/. For installation instructions, please refer to http://q4m.31tools.com/install.php.

Gads, someone else asking for E/R diagram support. We have 36 votes for this in Issuezilla. What is it with you guys?

First of all, MySQL Workbench really owns this space. Yes, I know, right now it only runs on Windows, but the next release will fix that. And, yes, I know it only works for MySQL, but the promise is that they will fix that too, albeit not right away. 

Secondly, NetBeans DB tooling has a huge opportunity because we're part of the IDE.  An E/R diagram tool doesn't really leverage that advantage.  There are things we can do that will make your day-to-day experience of slogging code for database applications really nice.  But we can't be doing that if we're spending all our time writing an E/R tool.

That said, we're looking very …

[Part I, Part II]

Perturbations in the Field

In the weeks leading up to the Dev meeting in Riga, the Falcon team dumped a record number of changes into the codebase, including a page cache optimization that contained a severe but undetectable bug.

The usual indicators offered no sign of trouble: the Pushbuild matrix was green, the Falcon regression tests passed, System QA reported nothing unusual. It wasn't until Philip modified the System QA stress tests that a problem emerged.

The modification was simple: kill mysqld at the end of the test, then restart the …

Come get it while it’s hot. The brand new issue six of the magazine is available for free download from http://www.mysqlzine.net.

Rudimentary analysis of Sun's SEC filings suggests that MySQL is not to blame, but investors won't know for sure unless Sun provides more information READ MORE

I’ve been doing a little reporting project, and I’ve been searching around for quite some time for a good graphing and charting solution for general-purpose use. I had come across ReportLab before, but it just looked so huge and convoluted to me, given the simplicity of what I wanted at the time, that I moved on. This time was different.

This time I needed a lot of the capabilities of ReportLab. I needed to generate PDFs (this is not a web-based project), I needed to generate charts, and I wanted the reports I was generating to contain various types of text objects in addition to the charts and such.

I took the cliff-dive into the depths of the ReportLab documentation. I discovered three things:

1. There is quite a lot of documentation
2. ReportLab is quite a capable library
3. The documentation actually defies the simplicity of the library.

It’s a decent bit easier than it …

I spoke yesterday with Mike Olson and Amr Awadallah about their new startup, and the appliance and BI markets. Mike is the former CEO of Sleepycat, and Amr was until recently a VP of engineering at Yahoo focused on BI for search. They’re joined by Christophe Bisciglia from Google and Jeff Hammerbacher, previously manager of Facebook's data team where Hive was developed.

They and several other founders created Cloudera to provide commercial support for Hadoop, an open source implementation of map-reduce (used for programatically processing large volumes of data on a compute cluster).

They said there are enough instances of companies using Hadoop in a commercial context that they believe there’s a market for commercial support on both internal installations and on Amazon’s …

I was reading Savio Rodrigues’ post, The economy and open source, in which he responds to Andrew Keen’s thoughts that a bad economy will see fewer open source contributions.

Now, Keen feels that people will contribute less during bad financial times:

The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

I know several volunteer open source developers — I consider this to be a “role” that someone plays. A person may be *employed* as an open source developer (say, working at Sun on …