There are some basic, golden rules when it comes to having a vibrant community of contributors.

The following are rules I have extracted and learned based on my experience managing and working with engineers actively involved and participating in the Apache/Derby, PostgreSQL and MySQL open-source communities. These rules are also based on extensive discussions with many folks involved with the MySQL community, with the PostgreSQL community and with the Apache/Derby (Java DB) community, over many years.

Before I go through these rules, I would like to thank Marten Mickos for having suggested some of the headings for these rules. (I originally had much longer headings for all of them.) I would also like to thank many of MySQL, PostgreSQL and Java DB colleagues, as well as to many other colleagues involved in open-source development, for having contributed to the ideas and practices behind these rules.

A) …

There are some basic, golden rules when it comes to having a vibrant community of contributors.

The following are rules I have extracted and learned based on my experience managing and working with engineers actively involved and participating in the Apache/Derby, PostgreSQL and MySQL open-source communities. These rules are also based on extensive discussions with many folks involved with the MySQL community, with the PostgreSQL community and with the Apache/Derby (Java DB) community, over many years.

Before I go through these rules, I would like to thank Marten Mickos for having suggested some of the headings for these rules. (I originally had much longer headings for all of them.) I would also like to thank many of MySQL, PostgreSQL and Java DB colleagues, as well as to many other colleagues involved in open-source development, for having contributed to the ideas and practices behind these rules.

A) …

What does that mean? Should we wait two …

There are still a few impediments, but the database group …

A while ago, MySQL developed a Community Contribution Agreement for community contributions to the MySQL source code. While browsing the MySQL Forge Wiki I came across:

http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Community_Contributions

This page shows that the Community Contribution Agreement has changed — it is no longer the document MySQL AB created. It is now Sun Microsystem’s standard Sun Contributor Agreement, which CEO Mårten Mickos recently explained to me was “more accepted than the agreement MySQL had come up with.”

I am happy to see some of the great Sun practices trickle down to replace some issues that MySQL did not handle smoothly. All in all, I agree with Mårten Mickos and think the Sun Contributor Agreement is much better….

….but what do you think?

Wouldn't it be cool to enhance MySQL creation table syntax to do this?

CREATE TABLE t1 (
  my_date DATE,
  my_month VIRTUAL INT AS (DATE_FORMAT(d,'%Y%m'))
);

And later, when you insert '2008-08-23' in my_date, then automatically my_month will be set to 200808.
Yes, it would be cool, and it has been done. Andrey Zhakov, a so far unknown to me community contributor, has extended the server code to implement virtual columns (WL#411) and functional indexes (WL#1075)
Andrey has published …

I hear now about a new competition for the MySQL® Users. The ‘MySQL® 5.1 Use Case Competition’ has been just launched by the Community Team @ SUN|MySQL.

If you submit a MySQL® 5.1 Use Case Report to the Community Team by 31 August 2008 you will have a chance of winning:

• 1st-3rd prize: A MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius
• 4th-10th prize: MySQL® Community Contributor T-shirts
• 11th-20th prize: A Sakila mascot (MySQL®’s pet dolphin)

More information at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_5_1_Use_Case_Competition.

[Reminder for the Community Team: the page …

If you search for Sinhala, a large fraction of the links you'll see point to something written by Harshula "hash" Jayasuriya. Sinhala is a very, very old language, but it's not very well developed on computing platforms. Its script is most often represented in Unicode, but the default Unicode collation table (DUCET) doesn't order its words ("collate") properly. Thus, MySQL didn't order it properly.

To fix that, hash recently submitted a collation implementation to MySQL, based on the Sri Lanka Standards Institution's SLS1134-pt1 document. It seems to be right, judging from our tests, but I would be much more comfortable if it were exposed to more eyeballs. The collation is on its way into the mysql-5.2 tree, and should be …