I’m pleased to announce that Connector/J has a new home.

Just as several other MySQL products, Connector/J source code management moved to Git and, pretty much as expected, to GitHub. Our reasoning is nothing else than listening to our users demands and trying to follow best trends and practices. There was nothing significantly wrong with Bazaar and Launchpad, as they served us well for the last seven years. It was just time to move on.

Rest assured, all will work as before, no complications no hassles. Our public GitHub repository will expose Connector/J source code as it is in the latest generally available (GA) release, as it has been for the last years.

From now on you will find …

This blog post is a by-product of my preparation work for an upcoming talk titled "Why you should be using a distributed version control system (DVCS) for your project" at SAPO Codebits in Lisbon (December 3-5, 2009). Publishing these thoughts prior to the conference serves two purposes: getting some peer review on my findings and acting as a teaser for the actual talk. So please let me know — did I cover the relevant aspects or did I miss anything? What's your take on DVCS vs. the centralized approach? Why do you prefer one over the other? I'm looking forward to your comments!

Even though there are several distributed alternatives available for some years now (with Bazaar, git and …

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 ( …

Sun is a huge company. So it comes as no surprise that I’m finding out about Project Kenai via Tim Bray, instead of some internal mailing list (believe me, there must be thousands).

Tim’s got a Q&A with Nick Sieger, who’s one of the chieftains behind Kenai. I find it amusing that the comparison is made against Google Code and GitHub - has SourceForge hit irrelevancy? I’m surprised Launchpad isn’t mentioned.

Very Cover Flow like UI, with slider, etc. That’s Elliot Murphy, ex-Dolphin, current Ubuntero in the pic above

Nick goes on to say “We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we …

How do you version your database schemas?

There are quite a lot of different options. On some very small / trivial applications developed by just one person, it might be acceptable to use ad-hoc queries (maybe with a GUI) to manage the schema - but this runs the risk of development and production schemas becoming out of sync (or rather, out of sync with their respective versions of code).

Requirements are typically

• Schema changes are held with the rest of the software in a SCM system
  
• Schema changes can be made in one development environment and will be correctly propogated with code to other development and production environments as required
• Schema changes can be rolled back (if for example, a deployment contains a serious bug)

There doesn't seem to be an easy answer for this one.

Our teams do something like:

…

At the start of this week, we suffered a corruption of our main 5.1 source code repository at MySQL. No data was lost, but I spent most of four working days on cleaning up the corruption, Monty spent one day, and many other people had to spend time on this or were stalled in their work while the problem was being resolved. Including the usual stories with fetching off-site backup tapes only to find them broken, etc.

Our source code repository is the centre that all our work in Engineering revolves around, and it just has to be stable. The confidence in the revision control software that we use suffers greatly from such an experience, and the lost confidence can never really be restored.

But there is a good lesson in this for MySQL, I think.

Like revision control software, MySQL is used by our users to store their valuable data. The database is the center around which applications revolve, and it must be …