This is more of an "behind the scenes" update and I hope that you won't see any (negative) changes on the PlanetMySQL front page or the RSS feeds: I just finished and commited the conversion of the backend script that performs the parsing and aggregation of feeds from requiring MagpieRSS to SimplePie.

This will provide better support for a wider range of feed types and should also fix a few quirks, e.g. that some postings (for example the one from Kevin Burton) only showed up as an "A" in the Planet's RSS feed. It hopefully also fixes a weirdness with time zones that …

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, …

As I mentioned some time ago, Software Freedom Day 08 will take place on Saturday, 20th of September 2008.

Coincidentally, the a large number of Sun/MySQL Engineers and other Sun folks will be in Riga, Latvia for an internal developer meeting around this day. To make use of this opportunity, we plan to give a number of sessions and presentations (in english) about various topics and to contribute to this global celebration of Open Source Software.

We've set up a Team Page on the Software Freedom Day web site for this event - the venue will be the …

As I mentioned some time ago, Software Freedom Day 08 will take place on Saturday, 20th of September 2008.

Coincidentally, the a large number of Sun/MySQL Engineers and other Sun folks will be in Riga, Latvia for an internal developer meeting around this day. To make use of this opportunity, we plan to give a number of sessions and presentations (in english) about various topics and to contribute to this global celebration of Open Source Software.

We've set up a Team Page on the Software Freedom Day web site for this event - the venue will be the …

While Colin beat me in blogging about Project Kenai, I think I can still provide some additional background information about this new project hosting service from Sun.

If you are a maintainer of an Open Source project, you currently have plenty of choice when it comes to getting your project hosted for free. One criterion could be your software configuration management system (SCM) of choice.

Some of the hosting services that I am currently aware of and the choice of SCM they offer include:

• BitBucket ( …

Tomorrow (Thursday, 11th of September) at 9:00 PST/16:00 UTC/17:00 GMT/18:00 CET, there will be an new free MySQL University Session. MySQL University started as an internal training program for MySQL engineers, to share and spread knowledge about their areas of expertise and has been available to the public for quite some time now. It covers a wide range of technical topics around the MySQL Server and usually takes place once per week.

For the first time, the presentation will not be performed by (former) MySQL employees/developers, but by two of our "Sun Classic" colleagues: Jyri Virkki (OpenSolaris Web Stack community lead) and Murthy Chintalapati (Sr Engineering Manager, Web Stack development) will talk about the …

One of the sessions at DrupalCon I attended was Larry Garfield's talk about "Drupal Databases: The Next Generation", which gave me a good insight into the current state of the Drupal database layer and how they plan to overhaul it for Drupal 7. The key points that I took away:

• A new API based on PDO
• Object-oriented, requiring PHP5
• Support for using prepared statements
• A unified access API
• A query builder
• More support for other database systems (currently Drupal supports MySQL and PostgreSQL only). In particular, they are …

The MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition is in full swing - we've already received a number of cool and interesting submissions, which we will turn into articles that will be published on the MySQL Developer Zone over the course of the coming weeks. Today we received a note from Jakub Vrána from the Prague, Czech republic. He's the author of phpMinAdmin, a MySQL management tool written in PHP. Here's what he wrote:

In the beginning of September 2008, I have implemented MySQL 5.1 Events to the database management tool phpMinAdmin. I've used the Windows version of MySQL 5.1.26 for the development.

As phpMinAdmin …

I had a nice chat with Kieran from Acquia at DrupalCon last week - we discussed how people running local Drupal user groups could expand their outreach into other communities, in particular into the MySQL User Groups. Scott Mattoon captured our conversation on video, which is now available on blip.tv:

Click To Play

The gist of what we talked about: if you are organizing a local Drupal User Group Meetup, check out http://mysql.meetup.com to find …