Over the weekend I updated my Drupal 7 test appliance in SUSE Studio to the Drupal 7.0-beta2 release, which was released on Oct. 23rd. I also added phpMyAdmin upon a user request, to provide a web-based method to work with the MySQL instance, if needed.

In addition to the lightweight "headless" appliance (which can only be accessed and configured via a remote network connection), I've now also created a GUI-based version. This appliance starts a minimal GNOME desktop and a Mozilla Firefox browser, which in turn opens the …

The Drupal community just recently released another alpha test release of their upcoming Drupal 7 version, to shake out the remaining bugs and to encourage more users to test it.

If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the …

CMake is a cross-platform, open-source build system, maintained by Kitware, Inc.

From the CMake.org home page:

CMake is a family of tools designed to build, test and package software. CMake is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler independent configuration files. CMake generates native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice.

It has been used for building the MySQL Server on Windows since MySQL 5.0 – the initial CMake build support was added in August 2006.

For …

We've now published a new set of binary packages including the extended GIS functionality from the mysql-5.1-wl1326 source tree.

This release is based on the MySQL 5.1.35 code base and fixes the bugs mentioned below. It includes some improvements to the GIS functionality as well, so please use these packages for future testing of the MySQL GIS functionality.

The following GIS-related bugs were fixed in this version:

• Bug#31753: Buffer/area functions only return first row of set
• Bug#32032: Contains() does not work on MultiPolygons, may force a disconnect and/or result in extremely long query times.
• Bug#32100: contains, …

Version 1.0.3-alpha of the MySQL Connector/C++ has just been announced by Lawrin Novitsky and is now available for download. This driver is licensed under the GPL and is a new implementation of the MySQL Client/Server protocol. Instead of wrapping the C API calls in C++ methods, the implementation mimics the JDBC API, which hopefully feels much more "native" to a seasoned C++ developer.

The driver has been ported to a wide range of platforms and is about to hit the beta test phase. So if you're writing a C++ application that needs to connect to a MySQL Server, give it a try! The developers are always looking 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 …

Now that the source tree for the new Falcon Storage Engine is finally public, here's a quick HOWTO on how to compile the server from source. This procedure is described in more detail in the MySQL Manual. I assume you use Linux and have the required development toolchain installed.

You first should get the free BK client from http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar, unpack and install it:

$ wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar
--17:34:34--   …

Now that the source tree for the new Falcon Storage Engine is finally public, here's a quick HOWTO on how to compile the server from source. This procedure is described in more detail in the MySQL Manual. I assume you use Linux and have the required development toolchain installed.

You first should get the free BK client from http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar, unpack and install it:

$ wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar
--17:34:34--   …