Since almost a year now, we host a weekly training session for our engineers on Thursday (14:00 UTC winter time), coined the "MySQL University". While it's primary purpose is to share and distribute knowledge about a wide variety of topics relevant to our own developers, many of the sessions are of general interest for developers on other projects as well.
Therefore we hold this sessions in the public and everybody is welcome to attend! You can listen to the presentation via an OGG Audio stream, questions can be posted via IRC on the #mysql-university channel on freenode.net. The audio file and IRC log will be saved, so you can also listen to past university sessions at a later point in time again.
Tomorrow's session will be about using the Valgrind memory checker, held by Stewart Smith, a colleague from Australia who is a member of the MySQL Cluster development team.
The next upcoming sessions include topics more closely related to MySQL Server development:
See the MySQL University page on the MySQL Forge Wiki for more details and follow the instructions for attendees to get connected.
I recently received a review copy of the book "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing) and finished reading it a few days ago.
The subtitle "A fast and practical guide" is a matching description - I managed to read the ~130 pages over the course of a week. The book is by no means an exhaustive reference manual, but it gives the reader a good overview about Xen and assists with performing the first steps and getting started.
Continue reading "Book review: "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing)"
Yesterday, Drupal 6.0 was officially released - check out this screencast to get a 29-minute tour on the new features in this release.
We'd like to congratulate the Drupal Developer Team and Community for reaching this milestone and are happy that the MySQL Server continues to serve well as the database backend for this awesome content management platform!
I had the pleasure of evaluating and reviewing a previous release of Drupal for the Open Source Content Management System Award from Packt Publishing and it has been one of my favourites.
Keep up the good work!
Like in the years before, I (and some other colleagues from MySQL) will be attending FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels, Belgium on February 23rd and 24th.
The schedule is packed as usual and lists several MySQL-related topics and sessions:
If you also plan to attend, please ping me if you would like to meet!
When it comes to handling my work-related email, many people will probably conclude that I am an old fart in Linux terms: I still use the console-based Pine as my MUA of choice, as my fingers have been hardcoded to its key combinations over the years (my first encounter with Pine was around 1994 on a shared DEC Ultrix box in my university). So far, I have not found any other application that allows me to process email as quickly as by using this tool.
I admit that I do use Thunderbird for my personal email, though, to gather experience with it (and to toy around with the various extensions, especially Nostalgy is a gift from heaven for people like me!). And of course because the mail volume there is less critical to cope with! But I am not going to start a holy war here - this article is supposed to explain how I have configured my mail setup to rotate the log files that keep track of all my incoming mails.
Continue reading "Linux tip: Automatically rotate/archive your fetchmail/procmail log files"
We have just published an interview with our CEO Mårten Mickos on our Developer Zone, where he answers a number of questions from the Community Team about Sun's plans to acquire MySQL AB and what this means for the MySQL User Community and the direction of the product (thanks to Colin for compiling and editing the text). I hope that the comments help to calm the concerns of some people about the future of MySQL with regards to Open Source, support of platforms or language bindings:
CT: Is MySQL fully committed to free and open source software, and the GPL?
Mårten: Yes.
CT: What does the Sun acquisition mean for Linux support? What about Windows, Mac OS/X and other platforms?
Mårten: One of the reasons for us to be interested to discuss an acquisition with Sun was their new strategy to work with technologies and companies that previously had been seen as competitors. Our mandate within Sun is to grow our database business - on all operating systems and with all development and scripting languages and on all hardware platforms. Linux remains the most important operating system for our business. Windows remains the top operating system among our downloads. Mac OS X is a vital platform and many of our own engineers use Mac notebooks.
CT: Will all the language bindings still be supported? i.e Will PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc. be treated as well as Java?
Mårten: Absolutely. See my previous answer. Our goal and mandate is to grow our business on all fronts.
I personally am very excited about this change and expect many good things to come out of it. Sun is really trying hard to "not screw this up" (quoting Jonathan Schwartz).
UPDATE: I just stumbled over another article about this topic, which I also consider recommended reading: Mårten Mickos: Why Did I Change My Mind?:
I may sound naively excited about Sun in my writing here, and perhaps I am. Perhaps I drank the Kool-Aid along with the traditional Swedish vodka shot when we closed the deal. But in my life and my professional career so far, I have never regretted using my gut instinct to choose between two rational alternatives.
