CPTN Holdings unmasked. Oracle updates MySQL. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Florian Mueller reported that the Novell patent acquiring CPTN Holdings is Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle.

# The VAR Guy told the (previously) untold story of Novell’s sale to Attachmate.

# Attachmate committed to support the existing roadmaps and release schedules for Novell and SUSE products.

# Oracle …

The Motley Fool had an interesting article yesterday about the OpenOffice spinoff, and what the impact to the open source community is starting to look like since the Oracle acquisition. While I’m not sure whether Anders has a crystal ball or is just consulting a magic 8 ball, I I’m sure it’s concerning to people to wonder what the support for MySQL will look like in the future.  I think there are some promising opportunities out there that might help relieve some of these anxieties.

The best resource the MySQL community has at its disposal is the same as it’s always been: fellow users. The ability to learn from the experience of other users and collaborate on how to make things better is the cornerstone of open source. This is true for customers running the Oracle stack as well. Oracle user groups …

I installed OOo 2 today. And I connected it to my locally running MySQL database via JDBC. I've been learning a lot about JDBC recently, what with a rash of customers wanting to know how to connect to MaxDB via Java.

I'm also working a bit with Peter Harvey and learning something about ODBC. It seems somewhat more complicated. Perhaps that's because it doesn't have a virtual machine to target. I don't know. They all seem similar to DBI.

I also installed the beta version of Thunderbird. The Debian package was a bit out of date and didn't have index-by-recipient. It was a major hassle for me, so I fixed it.

Ulf and I have been working with a potential customer who has been having issues connecting to his x_server with MaxDB SQL Studio. He was initially reporting that he could not issue a particular query. I tried to get it working locally and put together a little script to build his example database, given …