A few years ago, during the MySQL Conference opening keynote, two world maps of MySQL downloads were displayed. With the lights down, they made an impression.
Oddly enough, to the best of my knowledge, the downloads map has not been drawn again since then. I asked my friend and colleague Markus Popp, and he provided the data from the downloads logs, leaving the implementation to me.
A first attempt with Google Maps API produced a chart that is nice to see for a single country or town, but hardly pleasant for the entire world.

Then, I abandoned the easy path, and looked at CPAN for inspiration, and immediately found something that could solve my problem. Using …

Its the Firefox Download Day. That not only means Firefox 3 is out, it also means that they’re trying to set a world record, by getting the most downloads of a software package in 24-hours. There’s a nice world map, similar to the kind you might have seen in presentations by Jonathan Schwartz (ok, I prefer seeing the dots per region, rather than the Firefox one :P).

The pending general availability of MySQL 5.1 was announced in April at the MySQL Conference. While I’ve seen 1,400+ attendees (a pleasant problem for the event organisers, as they scurried to get people into overflow rooms, and herd the crowd during food times) show up at the Tech Days in the Philippines, I’m wondering if we can achieve 3 …