The MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 in Santa Clara is now in full swing and Karen Padir just gave the opening keynote, talking about Sun's continued and improved commitment to Open Source and the upcoming MySQL products like the MySQL 5.4 performance release or MySQL Cluster 7.0. One of the activities that she mentioned in her keynote is our ongoing activity to improve the acceptance and incorporation of patches contributed by the community.

We've scheduled a BoF about this topic …

The big news to kick off this week was Oracle’s announced acquisition of Sun Microsystems. There is already a lot of discussion of the integration challenges, how Oracle is getting into hardware (or as Matt Asay describes it, having an ‘iPod moment’) and of course, the implications for open source software. What stands out to me is the fact that the world’s biggest proprietary database player — one of few software giants that still sells and supports primarily proprietary software — will own the world’s most popular open source database, MySQL. It is unclear how significantly MySQL figures into the deal, but given Sun spent $1b acquiring it and further invested in its enterprise readiness and use, …

Giri Mandalika has written an article showing how to develop C++ database applications for MySQL and another article showing how to install MySQL Connector/C++ from the source.

Giri Mandalika has written an article showing how to develop C++ database applications for MySQL and another article showing how to install MySQL Connector/C++ from the source.

Giri Mandalika has written an article showing how to develop C++ database applications for MySQL and another article showing how to install MySQL Connector/C++ from the source.

The time is just running and it's already time, again, for students to apply for this year's Google Summer of Code program. PHP and MySQL are among the list of 150 participating organizations. So if you're a student and are interested to learn how OpenSource works, do some networking with some famous people or just want a Google T-Shirt it's your time to take a look at the different idea pages (PHP, MySQL, others) or come up with an own idea and apply. Oh if accepted you even can earn some money as part of the program ...

How does IBM’s open source strategy compare to Sun’s? Or Microsoft’s? What’s the difference between MySQL’s strategy and JasperSoft’s? Are some strategies better suited to engaging with organic open source communities, rather than inorganic? What on earth is the Open Core model?

These are some the questions we hoped to try and address with our Open Source is Not a Business Model report, published in October last year. As I mentioned yesterday, however, without an agreed set of definitions and a common vocabulary it is difficult for a broader understanding the implications of the various models to develop.

One of the ways we might be able to do that is to map the categories we used in our …

Hi all,

When I'm not sitting in front of a computer for work, I find myself sitting in front of a computer when I'm not working. And usually I;m messing around with something that I shouldn't have started messing around with.

MediaWiki

I manage the alumni site for my former military unit. I started the site in 2000, and it has grown tremendously to include 250 registered alumni. Not bad, eh? I'm constantly looking for ways to improve the site. I've had a guestbook and message board since the beginning, and I've also experimented with live chat (which wasn't so popular). I work a lot of hours for Sun, and it has become increasingly difficult to keep the site updated, especially the contact information for the 250 alumni. So I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: I'll create a wiki where members can keep their own contact information updated. I was a lot of work, but I finally got it up and running. This is what …

Let’s say you need to do a website that must support multiple languages for cultures as diverse as Japan, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil, as well as the US. This can be quite a daunting task, with all kinds of unexpected gotchas.

The ideal character set of choice is, of course, UTF8. Alas, you will note that most of the systems you’ll need to use defaults to LATIN1, including MySQL. If your site is written in PHP, that also by default is set to LATIN1.

I find it quite puzzling that in this day and age of globalization that many of the tools don’t default to UTF8. And there are major issues with this, because everything in the chain of delivery must either be set to UTF8 or can handle UTF8 or you’ll see bizarreness when you attempt to display the characters of some languages. You will probably see a series of question marks (“??? ??? ?????”) instead of the actual words. Sometimes you may see a series of squares. …

loops is a small and lightweight framework for Ruby on Rails and Merb created to support simple background loops in your application which are usually used to do some background data processing on your servers (queue workers, batch tasks processors, etc).

Originally loops plugin was created to make our (Scribd.com) own loops code more organized. We used to have tens of different modules with methods that were called with script/runner and then used with nohup and other not so convenient backgrounding techniques. When you have such a number of loops/workers to run in background it becomes a nightmare to manage them on a regular basis (restarts, code upgrades, status/health checking, etc).

After a short time of writing our loops in more …