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Google is your friend: 703,000 for novell software partner. (0.58 seconds)

This Sybase move now means that I can download and play with a serious database. It's a smart move because it means that I will be gaining skills in programming for that database engine, skills which are seriously marketable.

Maybe they heard you callling, because the latest MySQL newsletter has just what you're looking for.

The September newsletter from Mysql AB has a timely article, and reference to a product, FmPro Migrator that may be useful in your endeavor.

Go to the mysql download page and look for graphical clients.

Apparently, mySQLcc ("control center") is no longer under development, but I think it's pretty nice as is. There are two new projects replacing it that I haven't checked out yet.

It is still NOT a FileMaker like UI builder, though, but it does let you manage a database with a nice front end GUI.

"This query is called a left outer join because the table mentioned on the left of the join operator will have each of its rows in the output at least once, whe reas the table on the right will only have those rows output that match some row of the left table. When outputting a left-table row for which there is no right -table match, empty (null) values are substituted for the right-table columns.
Exercise: There are also right outer joins and full outer joins. Try to find out what those do."

when there really should be:

"TODO: There are also right outer joins and full outer joins. FIXME: We MUST write more."

Not to mention the "RTFS" answers in "TFM" for questions very frequently asked by beginners:

"4.3) How do I get a list of tables or other things I can see in psql?"
"You can read the source code for psql in file pgsql/src/bin/psql/describe.c."

Other than that I would say that PostgreSQL is definitely the way to go today. Once you get used to reading the source code as documentation (it is actually very clean and properly commented, so that's not such a big deal), you will really love it. And you will have the most important thing: ACID features. I hope it helps, I wish you the best luck.

See also:

1. http://www.postgresql.org/
2. http://www.mysql.com/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebird_(database_se rver)
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_management_s ystem
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model
10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_theory
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiomatic_set_theory
13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_logic
14. http://www.glom.org/
15. http://www.servoy.com/
16. http://www.dotcomsolutionsinc.net/products/fmpro_m igrator/index.html
17. http://www.firebirdsql.org/

(Please forgive me if I repeat anything which has already been said. I started to write it as a first post but it took some time and I am sure that other

media wiki is built on PHP, served from a webserver and keeps its data in a database. Currently I am running Apache and mysql. I believe their are windows ports of both available, as well php. Here are a few links.

http://us4.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.php
http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/4.0.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wikipedia/
http://www.cygwin.com/

I have not heard of anyone installing it on windows, so if you do get it running you may want to consider documenting your results and post it somewhere for others who want to follow in your footsteps. If you decide that it is to much effort, Linux generally installs very well on older hardware that can be had for virtually pennies.

Oh, and I feel safe enough from a slashdotting now that the thread activity has decreased, here is my website http://butsuri.homelinux.net/. It is on a dynamic IP but freely hosted through dyndns.

> No bug fixes from anyone outside AB? No feature additions from anyone outside AB?

MySQL AB's approach to this is that they own your contributions, thank you very much --- see for example the intro to
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Contributors.htm l.
I have not been through this personally but I think they require contributors of nontrivial work to sign an assignment of rights. Kinda like the FSF does, but with less benign intentions.

I shouldn't be judging a book by its cover, but if the website, is any indication, MySQL's direction re commercialism is somewhat painfully obvious. The layout to me suggests the kind of tacky, soulless "content" mentality I'd expect to see on macromedia.com or real.com, not the site of an open source project. I was also unable to locate a reference to the GPL licensed form of MySQL, whereas an advertisement of the "Pro" version was instantly apparent.

You are welcome to license your new versions or the same version under licenses other than the GPL, because the GPL is non-exclusive. You can re-license the original code to yourself, if you feel like getting that far into it, under any license you like. What you cannot do is revoke the GPL rights on copies already distributed.

True. However, mysql mas been doing something rather interesting lately. They dual-license mysq under their own license and a GPL-look-alike license. Why look-alike? Well, because it sure as heck not GPL. Let me elaborate.

Among other things what GPL boils down to is that you are allowed to use the product in any way you want as long as you do not modify it. If you do, you need to release the cahnges under GPL. That's not all of it, but that's the part that mysql "extended". In essense, they say that not only are you not allowed to make changes without releasing the source, but ou are not allowed to USE their GPLed software in non-GPL-licensed software. Unless, of course, you buy their commercial license, which they will try to sell you at any cost.

There's a big difference between MODIFYING and USING. Consider PHP, for example. PHP is a released under license incompatible with GPL. Yet it needs mysql as much as mysql needs php to be successful. So, PHP folks have to keep getting license exceptions, thanks to Zak Greant. It gets worse if you product relies on mysql, not merely uses it. A quick google search brought me here. There is a lot more to that, but you'd have to google on your own - somehow I am not searching for the right terms I guess. In essense, what mysql did is they said "Our software is licensed under GPL" and then turned around and said "But you can't use it as you'd use any GPL software, because we put extra restrictions in addition to GPL." Unfortunately, most people just hear the first message, develop their software so it relies on mysql and then - BOOM! - they find that "clarification" from mysql ab. Once you bite the hook and cannot go back, they can force you to get their commercial license. Either that, or release the entire source code for your whole product that relies on mysql, even if no changes whatsoever were made to mysql itself. Fun, eh?

I am not going to argue on the merits of whether they can actually say that they are licensing a piece of software under GPL, and then add a "clarification" to that. I would be very surprised if such a thing would ever stand up in court, but I am most certainly not a lawyer, and neither do I have much faith in the judicial system. Even if it were to fail in court, the costs of acquiring a few commercial licenses are dwarfed by even the most modest court expenses, so for most people it's a no-brainer - just go and get the license. And for mysql it's the source of revenue through extortion.

You may believe that you can use mysql in a non-GPL product, and you are fine because you comply with the REAL GPL, not the mysql's version of GPL. Maybe you even have the money to fight that claim in court and prevail. That's fine. THe thing that matters most though is that even if you are not vilating the LETTER of the law, you are still violating the SPIRIT of the license, as mysql AB has stated so clearly in their "clarification". That fact alone makes me shiver and think again about what kind of company mysql ab is, and whether it would be prudent for me to recommend their software to my clients, whether they are interested in a commercial license, or intend to use mysql in a GPL-compliant way.

These are merely my opinions based on a fair amount of research I had to make on the subject. Not a legal advice by any means. Please, feel free to disagree with me and hire a lawyer if you need to.

From MySQL 4.1 onwards, you can do SET SESSION sql_mode='ANSI_QUOTES'; There are several database compatibility modes available (DB2, MAXDB, MSSQL, MYSQL323, MYSQL40, ORACLE, POSTGRESQL) as well that bring the SQL syntax slightly closed to those variants (though there are still differences that must be noted) or you can go with ANSI which applies several options to help bring MySQL into line. More information is available in the documentation on the MySQL Server SQL Mode. That said, I still prefer PostgreSQL.

Funny that the article didn't mention the $19.5 million series B round of funding received in June 2003...

That's gotta do something...

Remember: there is always BabySQL, which plays nicely with Toy Languages.

I still wonder why most provider have not long ago switched to SQLite, which serves the purpose MySQL is usually used for much better.

Wake me up when there's an SQL interface to DB.

Wake up! mySQL is a SQL interface on top of Berkeley DB.

However I agree the grandparent post is wrong in comparing BDB to Cloudscape.

You forgot to mention CVS (http://www.cvshome.org/). Usually database developers commit their changes to their stored procedures directly into the only database, where they are stored. That is not good, because other Java developers are using the same database at the same time, so they see intermittent bugs.

It is better if all code goes into CVS, even stored procedures. Not to mention that every developer must have a copy of the database in their own machine, usually MySql (http://www.mysql.com/) or HSQL (http://hsqldb.sourceforge.net/) is better for that.

Then from CVS you take out a build (you use CruiseControl to generated builds that are compiled and unit tested using JUnit http://www.junit.org/) so you know all the Java code works with the stored procedures, the database model and the example data. Then you can add your code, with your unit tests, into CVS.

My $0.02 CLP (= $0.0000318238 USD according to http://www.xe.com/ucc/)

Well, pardon me, but open source databases are more than MySQL. The significant open source databases, in terms of features, not number of users, are:

• MaxDB, formerly SAP DB.
• Firebird, a fork of Interbase 6.0
• And ofcourse PostgreSQL, as others have mentioned.

Oh come on! They consolidated 21 databases and moved to Oracle. That's why it is 1000 times faster. The move to Linux is a footnote as far as the performance issue is concerned -- as stated in the article, the move to Linux was for cost. I'm sure Solaris or god help me, Windows Server 2003 would have given similar performance results. Now if they had moved to MySQL...

Sure, consolidation is one key to this improvement. Probably they created indexes and stuff, but probably some code (or procedures) were rewritten.

I guess MySQL wouldn't be much faster - at least it doesn't handle all the ANSI-SQL standards, like inner queries or transactions. Yes, it's good for some web applications and less complicated but heavy loaded stuff. Great database there - but for stock exchange? (Yes, MySQL has improved a LOT from version 4.x. I know that already.)

I think your argument is correct. Who could possibly think there's other companies or organizations that build influential software that people use all the time?

No, truly, Microsoft is the only place to create influential software...

Why steal software? Many software packages are reasonably priced, and many are offered with rebates and upgrade coupons. See more here

On the other hand, most of the truely great apps are written for linux. They are usually feature packed, have very little security problems, etc.. Examples would be MythTV, Apache, MySQL, the GIMP, Mozilla and Firefox, etc... The list goes on!

--
Craploads of deals updating in real time from all the best deal sites.

>The first three things you listed have all been MySQL features ever since they added the InnoDB engine

from Creating InnoDB Tables:
To create an InnoDB table, you must specify and ENGINE = InnoDB or TYPE = InnoDB option in the table creation SQL statement:

CREATE TABLE customers (a INT, b CHAR (20), INDEX (a)) ENGINE=InnoDB;
CREATE TABLE customers (a INT, b CHAR (20), INDEX (a)) TYPE=InnoDB;


Do I also have to say "pretty please can I have a real database now?"

>As for "stored procedures, views, triggers, ..." these fall under the category of --USELESS FEATURES--

OK, you've just revealed yourself as someone who has never worked on a project that involved large data volume. When you get to that point, triggers and stored procs are your friend. Otherwise have fun setting up that gig-E between your MySQL server and application server.

Oh wait, let me guess... same box?

Here's a hint: the key to a multitier architecture is that code runs in multiple tiers. There's a reason for that. It's not "useless".

...useless until you realize you have to connect to the DB from several applications written in several different languages for which you have either to reimplement your way to manipulate the data everywhere, or you have to put in a middle layer of some sort which is able to talk multiple languages (via CORBA, SOAP, plain XML RPC, custom protocol, whatever) and ensure that everyone is accessing data exclusively through it.

Reimplementing logic everywhere across different languages is usually a bad approach because it doubles the development and testing effort.

Middle layers are usually hard to get right the first time, much harder than using stored procedures and triggers, since the typical procedural language is not so at ease at manipulating relational data.

On MySQL: it has a somewhat bad reputation in the field because of the people abusing it: it's fast, it's free, it's easy to set up, but living with these gotchas is definitively too painful for developers more concerned about correctness than speed.

In the end: firing up Firebird/Oracle/PostgreSQL/SAPDB for simple data is plainly stupid, but often it is done anyways since they do a decent job even in that cases; firing up MySQL for your 30+ GB DB containing your whole network topology which is used by everyone for billing, service assurance, troubleshooting, network planning and whatever is stupid as well. MySQL AB knows that, and in fact it now proposes MaxDB (was: SAPDB) as well.

Case in point! FUD FUD FUD! Or is it just ignorance...

The first three things you listed have all been MySQL features ever since they added the InnoDB engine (version 4.0 I think, two years ago). Maybe you should RTFM!

As for "stored procedures, views, triggers, ..." these fall under the category of --USELESS FEATURES--. The only exception there might be views, but even that is debatable.

As for enterprise class, you can certainly pay somebody for support if you want to. No it's not the vendor, but they have the source code (along with anybody else who wants it.)

That's why sequences (as implemented by PostgreSQL and Oracle) are handy. Simply create a sequence, and call NEXTVAL(sequence_name) to get the identity of the next record. It isn't an autoincrementer (but can be used as one with default values), and you get the advantage of knowing what ID you will use before your insert - very handy for inserting a lot of related data at once. You can also do tricks like having sequences with different increment numbers, different base values, or even concatenate them with a string to get multi-master friendly safe replication.

For a sequence/nextval to be useful, the increment must be absolutely atomic - that is, it must return the next value and increment without any chance of the same number being given to another caller. Oracle and PostgreSQL do this for you.

You can simulate these in SQL Server with the following stored procedure (original source here: Sequence table: CREATE TABLE sequences ( -- sequence is a reserved word seq varchar(100) primary key, sequence_id int ); MS SQL Server stored procedure: CREATE PROCEDURE nextval @sequence varchar(100), @sequence_id INT OUTPUT AS -- return an error if sequence does not exist -- so we will know if someone truncates the table set @sequence_id = -1 UPDATE sequences SET @sequence_id = sequence_id = sequence_id + 1 WHERE seq = @sequence RETURN @sequence_id I've used this to great effect in SQL server. I've had to emulate it in Access once (yuck! it worked, though!). I've never tried it in MySQL, but it can probably be done.

This page (see LAST_INSERT_ID(expr) talks about how to do it in MySQL. I don't use MySQL when I can avoid it; it's a great, fast database for high-read environments without triggers and similar, but I've never seemed to end up working in one of those!

It would be a little silly to sell a product when you distribute the source for it on your website.

Another thing to note is that MySQL has placed their libraries under the GPL, making them somewhat incompatible with the PHP license. This has caused a bit of a rift in the PHP community, with the result being that MySQL will probably be less supported by the PHP developers while PostgreSQL increases in support.

Call me when mysql supports nested queries. And a bunch of other features like replication etc
You mean like this: Subquery Syntax (in 4.1 and higher) ... and this: Replication in MySQL (since 3.23.15!) Time to apt-get upgrade mental-database, methinks.

Call me when mysql supports nested queries. And a bunch of other features like replication etc
You mean like this: Subquery Syntax (in 4.1 and higher) ... and this: Replication in MySQL (since 3.23.15!) Time to apt-get upgrade mental-database, methinks.

So, in theory, the community at large gets to use MySQL "for free" (thus giving MySQL a large user, test and debugging base), while commercial clients that desire accountability and support can get the commercial license (thus paying for all the developers and, I guess, millions of free users). It sounds cockeyed, but apparently it's working for them. Isn't this a good possibility for Open Source projects to make money while still remaining true to the spirit of the GPL?

Riiiight. Commercial product off of OSS.

May I direct you to a few companies/products that seem to be doing well in this regard:

• MySQL
• Trolltech (Qt)
• Apple's MacOS X
• Nokia's IPSO platform (based on FreeBSD)

I'm sure other slashdot readers can provide further examples. The trick with GPL-based OSS and generating revenue, is to provide value-add (which may be through commercial closed-source tools). Alternatively, the tried and true position is through services, which IBM and HP seem to have figured out.

MySQL has changed their licensing recently and they are very restrictive about which OSI Approved licenses are acceptable for use with their product (without paying the licensing fee). If it's not GPL, you are likely going to have issues. They have a very short list of what does and does not qualify. However, they are responsive when you write them at licensing@mysql.com (albeit it took several days) when you need clarification.

Apparently PostFix's OSI Approved IBM Public License does not qualify so I'm having to prep to pay for licensing since we use postfix with MySQL (confirmed with their licensing folks). They did assert that they were still in the process of reviewing other licenses.

SQL Server 2005 Adds Security Features.

What you mean that it doesnt have them already?
Man that frightening we have to wait till 2005 to get security features. Microsoft must be so out of date! Why not look at MySQL or postgres ?

nick ..

But in the case of having something asymmetric, something like this would be *incredibly* nice. I'd looove for a free software package to integrate something like OpenSSL in, so that I could encode a column using a certificate variable.

Still, Microsoft is doing a good thing overall.

But in the case of having something asymmetric, something like this would be *incredibly* nice. I'd looove for a free software package to integrate something like OpenSSL in, so that I could encode a column using a certificate variable.

Still, Microsoft is doing a good thing overall.

Whether you like it or not, English is the de facto standard of computer languages. While it would make sense to write programs in your native language, eventually you will reach the point where you need to work with others around the world.

While in college, I had to work with graduate students from India and China. We couldn't understand each other all the time, but we could read each other's code. I'm now in industry, but my company does work all over the world. It's pretty normal in my industry to have distributed project teams. With the advent of the internet, distributed projects have become more and more common. And we will probably see a rise in distributed companies, such as MySQL AB. A company like this couldn't exist if there weren't some sort of language standard.

Personally, I don't care what spoken language is decided on, but consider that the majority of developers in the world can speak English. Given that, it just makes sense to keep things in English as it will require the fewest number of people to have to learn a language.

Not that I trust anything to make any release (for any product), and not that it does any good for you now, but I think stored procedures and views are due in some form in version 5.

So if I were to write some code and release it under the GPL, could I simultaneously license the same code to a company that wants to add it to their proprietary product?

Yes. In fact, the people who make MySQL do exactly that.

They get around the contributions thing by having a policy, similar to the GNU project, that any contributed code will not be merged into the main tree unless the author assigns copyright to MySQL AB.

• Abiword - Word processor, supports .doc, .rtf, GPL.
• Open Office - Whole Office suite, including a database frontend and BASIC macro language.
• Perl - Scripting language
• Python - Scripting language
• Cygwin - UNIX emulator. Can create Windows programs, reliant on a cygwin1.dll.
• MinGW - Port of some of the UNIX utilities (BASH, gcc, vi...) to Windows.
• djgpp - UNIX emulator for DOS.
• Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird - Web browser, e-mail client, IRC client, lots more.
• Filezilla - FTP client.
• xchat - IRC client.
• putty, pscp, psftp and others - Telnet/SSH clients.
• Gaim - Client for IRC/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ/AIM and more.
• gzip - Compression (usually better than .zip).
• tar - Extracts/Makes tar archives.
• bzip2 - Totally ace compression (usually better than gzip).
• Info-ZIP - Support for .zip. Good free substitute for Winzip.
• 7-zip - Support for multiple compression formats.
• frhed - Hex editor
• Ext2fs - Several programs for doing Ext2 under Windows.
• Antiword - Converts documents out of the proprietary .doc format.
• MySQL - RDBMS.
• Apache - Web/Proxy server
• sendmail - Mail server
• squid - Proxy server
• freeamp - Audio player
• winlame - MP3 encoder
• cd-ex - MP3/OGG encoder?
• gimp - Very detailed graphics program.
• imagemagick - Graphic manipulation. Provides the 'convert' utility under UNIX.
• freeciv - Civilisation clone.
• gnuplot - Plotting package.
• TightVNC - A fork of VNC, with enhancements.
• RealVNC - The original VNC.
• rdesktop - Access Windows Terminal Services and Remote Desktops.
• Nmap - Well known port scanner.
• John the Ripper - Password cracker. Does NT and MD5.

They've just added MySQL 4.0 for OpenBSD 3.5. It doesn't exist on the 3.4 packages, and it wasn't in ports for 3.4.

If you got a snapshot on the 29th you probably didn't get 3.5. Instead you ended up with current, and not only that, but you got it durring the greatest period of change and instability....

Well, it booted up as 3.5, so if it wasn't 3.5 it was sure a neat trick :) Either way, it didn't behave any differently.

However, I was able to find a solution. 0racle mentioned that there was a long standing issue with MySQL and OpenBSD, so I took a look in the MySQL manual and found an entry regarding the same issue for OpenBSD 2.8. It hadn't come up in my numerous Google searches before, probably because I was searching for OpenBSD 3.x issues. I used the suggested fix, and SQL-bench was able to run. It just ran last night.

However, the results were pretty terrible for the insert operations. It took longer than even the bad FreeBSD 5.1 result, about 3 times longer than with Solaris, FreeBSD 5.2.1, or Linux on the same hardware. I'll publish an addendum to the article soon with the results.

You were of great help :)

I just checked the manual, and found this:

OpenBSD 2.8 problem

Interesting, I hadn't seen that before. It's for 2.8, but it seems to be the same issue I had. When I get back from Hawaii I'll run MySQL with that tweak, see if that resolves the problem.

After that, it depends on my OS. For most of the Linux installs I do, the next few things I install will be MySQL, OpenLDAP, Apache, and PHP, which takes care of most of my needs. My Windows box (which, I admit, I use at home) is a little more fun:

2. iTunes
3. Whatever freeware Shisen-Sho app I can find
4. Starcraft
5. Several games later, OpenOffice.org

Let's be honest: does a computer really need anything else? I certainly don't think so.

• gentoo linux
• FreeBSD
• bash
• vim
• perl
• ruby
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Apache
• PHP
• links www browser
• wget
• K Desktop Environment
• Mozilla Firefox
• xchat
• gimp
• Openoffice.org

MySQL-Front - Old version of the MySQL windows front end, much much better than the new one you pay for. Source isnt open and the old developer discontinued development, possibly one of the best advertisements for why OSS is good :(

Try MySQL Control Center. It's free and works a lot like Microsoft's Enterprise Manager for MS SQL Server.

To the best of my knowledge, you have never neen able to execute more than one query per call to MySQL.

Of course they were nice enough to add it into 4.1, but you still have to enable it when you open the connection, so it's not insecure by default.

This means that you can change backend databases trivially, merely by changing one line of code.

That assumes that the SQL still works. Some databases don't follow the SQL spec very closely, so lots of stuff breaks. And sometimes you use a feature only available to some databases.

[X] TRANSACTIONS

Well, you can't beat MySQL for its cheapness facor. Let's face it, most people don't need some professional job, myself included.

By that, do you mean most people don't need more features, as in PostgreSQL and Firebird? Both are free (in fact, more free, if you consider MySQL's licensing requirements for businesses) ... and both are supported by interface layers like jdbc/odbc, as well as perl, php, and so forth ...

What about MySQL 5? Stored procedures seems to be the biggest new feature...

I think it does have a lot to do with the name.
MySQL, maybe it is My-Ess-Que-Ell or maybe it is My-Sequel, but Postgresql? Postgr-ehz-Que-Ell? Postgreh-Sequel, Postgray-Que-Ell?

I'm sure it was said in jest, but 30 seconds of "research" gives us the following...

From MySQL manual, "The official way to pronounce MySQL is ``My Ess Que Ell'' (not ``my sequel''), but we don't mind if you pronounce it as ``my sequel'' or in some other localized way."

From the PostgreSQL FAQ, "PostgreSQL is pronounced Post-Gres-Q-L."

Here's the problem

The trolls have already sounded off about MySQL's lack of transactions and the like. Fine. But if you're getting started with SQL and need a database that has thorough documentation and some speed under the hood for that niche of folks, then MySQL is da bomb.

And that's just the point. Database needs have left the castle walls of the big iron, elitist enterprise. Lots and lots of personal and SOHO solutions to meet, and MySQL can be the tool for those people. Get over it.

I repeat: the MySQL documentation is what draws a lot of people in.