50 things to know before migrating Oracle to MySQL by Baron Schwartz is an interesting read, it points out clearly that MySQL is not Oracle. However, Oracle is not the benchmark by which all others are to be judged. So what do we compare with, or actually, why do we compare at all?

Hmm, so we take three steps back, and get a much better view... Marten Mickos (MySQL CEO from 2001 until the Sun acquisition in 2008) said it all along "MySQL does not compete with Oracle". I don't think people actually appreciated what he was saying, or even believed that he meant precisely what he said. They might have thought "oh that's just positioning and protesting too much to make the opposite point". But he wasn't, it was the clear plain truth and it still is today (and so it should remain, I think).

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In case you are processing and working with geospatial data on MySQL, you may be interested in the following UDF (plugin) for MySQL 5.1: Koji Okumura from Oki Labs Japan has ported two functions from PostGIS into a MySQL UDF:

• distance_sphere(point, point): Returns linear distance in meters between two lat/lon points. Uses a spherical earth and radius of 6370986 meters. Faster than distance_spheroid(), but less accurate. Only implemented for points
• distance_spheroid(point, …

In case you are processing and working with geospatial data on MySQL, you may be interested in the following UDF (plugin) for MySQL 5.1: Koji Okumura from Oki Labs Japan has ported two functions from PostGIS into a MySQL UDF:

• distance_sphere(point, point): Returns linear distance in meters between two lat/lon points. Uses a spherical earth and radius of 6370986 meters. Faster than distance_spheroid(), but less accurate. Only implemented for points
• distance_spheroid(point, …

Even though we had been preparing the migration to Bazaar for a while now, today's announcement kind of caught me by surprise. But I am very happy about this move!

While BitKeeper is an excellent tool and served us well the past eight (!) years, I was quite annoyed when BitMover decided to remove the fully functional free BitKeeper client, which effectively put our development back into a Cathedral: even though our source trees remained accessible via bkbits.net, the crippled bk client was only capable of cloning and pulling new revisions from there - it was not possible for an …

While helping a user with some questions about the geospatial extensions of MySQL on the #mysql-dev IRC channel on Freenode, I stumbled over this blog: How to use MySQL Spatial Extensions. There currently is just one post, but it was exactly what we were looking for: "Using Circular Area Selection". Nice work! I hope the author will soon provide more examples of how to make use of this functionality.

By the way, there is work in progress to improve the GIS functionality in MySQL - if you are looking for new GIS functions that do not use …

There is a lot of exciting stuff happening inside of MySQL AB. But due to the distributed nature of our company it's hardly possible to get a good overview about what the various teams of our development department are currently working on and what they have achieved since the last time we met.

So one cool new idea for our currently ongoing MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg was to let developers show off their work to each other. They were encouraged to prepare demos, either in the form of slide shows or by running live demonstrations from their laptops. Last Thursday and Saturday we allocated time for these team exhibitions and the exhibitors set up tables in the meeting rooms for others to sit next to them, see the new and cool stuff and chat about it. The non-exhibiting attendees received a sheet of paper where they could collect signatures for each demo point they visited, the one that managed to see the most demos was eligible for …

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 …