Ok, better hurry… early registration prices for the 2005 MySQL Users Conference end February 28. The conference will take place April 18 -21, 2005 in Santa Clara, California. http://www.mysqluc.com/registration

As I mentioned recently, the complete minute-by-minute schedule of the daytime program is on-line, so you can pick and choose which talks you want to attend: http://www.mysqluc.com/pub/w/35/grid.html

I reckon there’s plenty of choice to make almost everybody happy. When I was working on the program schedule, I asked some people to go through the drafts and make up their “perfect” program. This to see if they would find themselves having to choose between two equally appealing (to them) parallel items, or whether they would perhaps find themselves bored during some hours. It worked out pretty well.

Anyway, early reg gets you freebies (books and such) and can save you like USD 300 or so. So why wait.

As for the conf itself… I’ll be there too, of course.

I got an excellent comment about yesterday’s entry (about the 58 open source licenses), relating the story to closed source licensing. While compatibility is generally not an issue there, some standardisation would of course be nice so that users of closed source software can easily assess whether a license or EULA is suitable for them.

Take the 95.000 projects hosted on SourceForge, most of them are GPL but at the very least they would use one of the 58 OSI licenses. Looking at it from that perspective, open source isn’t doing too badly, really!

I think it would still be good to make it even simpler, but in relative terms it’s very standardised already.

That’s the running debate reported at http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40672.html

OSI being the Open Source Initiative which is the organisation that tests prospective licenses with the fundamentals of the Open Source definition and approves. Of course people are free to license how they see fit, but this is a nice benchmark.

The problem of course is that there are now already 58 licenses that are OSI approved. It’s all open source, but many are incompatible with eachother. This creates a quagmire when you’re putting together a product made up of open source components with different licenses.

I think the article is an interesting read. The idea is to reduce down to 3 licenses:

• The General Public License (GPL);
• the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and
• a BSD-style license.

I would, personally, be quite pleased with a reduction in the number of licenses. It makes life much easier, without actually limiting anything. If you look at the licenses listed at OSI, most of them are very similar with trivial differences. They just need to be made generic with “fill in the blanks here” like GPL does.

People sometimes ask me why MySQL doesn’t make its own license to best fit its needs. This is the reason! MySQL actually did have its own license before 2000, and at that point the (IMHO wise) decision was made to go GPL. Yes, it does mean we always have to think hard about our business model as noone else has gone before us, but that’s a worthwhile challenge.

So what does the buzz about MySQL Network mean, for you?
I wrote an article about it: MySQL Network and You.

In a nutshell:

• Some people spend time to save money, and MySQL Community Edition is for them.
• Other people spend money to save time, and MySQL Network is for them.

And the most important thing: Nothing has been taken away, nor was licensing changed, nor code forked.
There is a single code base for the MySQL server, dual-licensed with the free version available under the GPL license.

If you have any feedback or questions, please feel to ask on the dedicated forum.

User question heard on the grapevine:

How can I define an index on row?
I know how to do that for column, but I want to search across the columns in row N 11

What can you say…

Just a little hint for Valentine’s Day 😉

Computers are not a compatible feature in plans for a romantic surprise. No ifs or buts.
If you’re going away for Valentines, don’t bring along your laptop, not even if it is a cool PowerBook.

And here comes your big test: do you leave on your mobile? NO!

T U R N   I T   O F F
(or you will turn her off)

Have a great day!

Phew…finally online, the complete schedule for the MySQL Users Conf.
http://mysqluc.com/pub/w/35/grid.html

Early registration ends February 28, so if you want the best deal, do register soon!
http://www.mysqluc.com/registration

So who’s gonna talk?
Well, we’ve got keynotes from Monty and David (MySQL founders), Mårten Mickos (MySQL CEO), Adam Bosworth (Google), Martin Fink (HP), Miguel de Icaza (Novell/Ximian/GNOME), Michael Tiemann (Red Hat), and Tim O’Reilly.
Then people from LiveWorld, Friendster, Sabre (Travelocity), LiveJournal, and quite a few other places. Lots of experience from the real world!
And of course a bundle of MySQL developers.
Ohye, and me too. I get to go this year – horay!

If you want to learn how best to do stuff, how others did it, make MySQL fly, hear what’s new and coming up soon, talk with people and have a unique opportunity to ask questions… this is definitely the conf to be at.
I hope to see you there.

Being a programmer since long ago, I hope I’ve acquired a few good habits when developing applications.
These days, if you’ve played in FrontPage or Dreamweaver, you’re a webmaster! And if you can write

printf("Hello World!");

you must be a programmer. Oh dear… what’s the world coming to!
Realistically, many applications out there are very badly designed. Or perhaps, not even designed at all. Just bad coding habits gone nasty. This results in problems with efficiency, security, bugs, maintainability, and so on. Naturally, this applies to SQL schemas and queries as much as it does to application code!

At the MySQL Users Conference, I’ll be doing my Confession Time: Deadly Sins in MySQL talk. That session touches on just a small selection of examples. It’s been heaps of (educational) fun at previous conferences and user group meetings.

I’m thinking about gathering a few other experienced people at the conf, and doing a BoF session on this topic. Now, I was talking on IRC (#mysql on irc.freenode.net) with various users, and devs of some popular PHP applications were actually quite willing to have their app taken apart. Or perhaps “shredded” is the more appropriate word for this venture ;-). I really applaud their willingness to not only show it all (well, the sources are already available) but also take the feedback.
So I’m thinking about using one particular (willing!) app as an example, with at least one of its developers present (brave person!). This is a bit of a challenge…. but I think it’s for the good, if the result is that more people pick up good design and coding habits! Perhaps some nice dev zone articles can come out of it, also.

Which application do you think would be an ideal candidate? And are you one of its developers?
Just post a comment to this entry, and we’ll see! Who dares…

If you’re interested in MySQL Cluster, do check out the new feature article on the MySQL dev zone:

HOWTO set up a mysql cluster for two servers.

It’s written by Alex Davies, from the UK. I have to say it, he’s a teenager – and I do mean that in the best possible way! 😉
I think it rocks. He clearly understands the concepts of cluster and high availability in general, and I reckon it also shows that cluster technology is now “for everyone”.

I also hope we’ll receive many more articles from the MySQL Community in the future! If you’re a budding author, please do drop me a line.

In case you were pondering about going…. MySQL will be there! CEO marten Mickos is doing a keynote (he’s a good speaker), and there will be a number of MySQL people and partners for you to talk with.

There will actually also be a major announcement at the conf, about proactive MySQL services. Sounds fuzzy, doesn’t it – sorry. But I reckon it’s good stuff. Stay tuned.

Anyway, the conf website is at:
http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/events/12BOS05A

Marten’s talk will be about “the disruption that open source software has unleashed upon the technology world […] brought out powerful emotions and opinions about its impact on the software industry. Not surprisingly, the feelings you express (or suppress) depend greatly on where you work, and what you do.”