Yes, I know. JavaOne is about Duke, the friendly mascot of Java technology. Created and maintained by James Gosling and all.

But MySQL also introduces Sakila to the JavaOne attendees. Sakila is also friendly, and the mascot of MySQL technology. The dolphin was chosen by MySQL founders Michael “Monty” Widenius and David Axmark, as was its name Sakila (which came from a naming contest in the early days).

Together with Giuseppe (in the picture above) and the rest of the MySQL Community Team, I will be handing out incarnations of Sakila (also seen above in the pic) at CommunityOne and JavaOne as follows:

• Monday 5 May 2008 09:30-10:45: CommunityOne General Session: Ian Murdock, Sun Microsystems; Panel: Matt Asay, Alfresco CNET, Mårten Mickos, MySQL, Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation, Ted Leung, Python, Stormy Peters, OpenLogic; Rich Green, Sun Microsystems
• Monday 5 May 2008 12:25-13:20, Moscone South - Esplanade 307: S297794 Creative Programming with the MySQL Management System, Giuseppe Maxia, MySQL
• Monday 5 May 2008 13:30-14:25, Moscone South - Esplanade 307:
  S297257 Scaling MySQL, Scott Feldstein, Hyperic
• Monday 5 May 2008 16:00-16:55, Moscone South - Esplanade 307: S297136 Streamlined Web Applications with MySQL Cluster and mod_ndb, John David Duncan, MySQL
• Tuesday 6 May 2008 15:20-16:20: TS-7813 The MySQL JDBC API Driver, And Making It Do What You Want, Mark Matthews, Darren Oldag, MySQL
• Tuesday 6 May 2008 16:40-17:40: TS-7814 MySQL Cluster and Java Technology (and Python, and Ruby, And…), Monty Taylor, MySQL
• Tuesday 6 May 2008 19:30-20:20: BOF-5039 JDBC 4.1 Specification Overview, Lance Andersen, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Mark Matthews, MySQL

Ah, and rumour has it that Jonathan may pop in during Giuseppe’s presentation!

Come, ask a smart question, interact, and get a Sakila!

With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
• Tools: GUI, MySQL Workbench, MySQL Proxy
• Events: MySQL Users Conferences
• Licensing: GPL
• Architecture of Participation, Summer of Code, Virtual company
• Other: Release Policy, Documentation, Use cases

I hope this will make my blog more (re)usable.

(The picture is from this summer, when navigating the way up the Großvenediger, a 3662 m high mountain in the Hohe Tauern region of Austria.)

Today MySQL releases the first beta version of MySQL Connector/ODBC 5.1. This means that Connector/ODBC 5.1 is now feature complete. Go download it!

Connector/ODBC 5.1 is suitable for most MySQL versions in active use today. It works with MySQL 4.1, 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0. If anyone is still on 4.0 or earlier releases, you should have upgraded ages ago; consider Connector/ODBC 5.1 “the final straw”.

As I wrote in September when we released the alpha version,

It is a partial rewrite of the the original MyODBC 3.51 code base, originally developed by Monty and Venu Anuganti, including individual parts of the current 65K ODBC 5 code base.

The new ODBC 5.1 driver, like 3.51, supports all relevant platforms (including Win64). While ODBC mostly is relevant for Windows, we have some (but not many) Linux based ODBC users.

Overall, ODBC 3.51 (released as 3.51.20) is now in a better state than ever. The ODBC QA team has written several hundred new tests. Without doubt, the 3.51 code base is now a good fundament for the new ODBC 5.1 version.

We’ve added a MSI installer for Windows 64-bit and implemented a native Windows setup library. We’ve implemented most parts of the section in my September blog titled “Before ODBC 5.1 goes beta, you can expect the following functions”, except sqlbigint and the native Mac OS X setup library. There is no binary package for Mac OS X on 64-bit PowerPC because Apple does not currently provide a 64-bit PowerPC version of iODBC. Also, the HP-UX 11.23 IA64 binary package does not include the GUI bits because of problems building Qt on that platform.

For more details on functionality added and bugs fixed, look for Jim Winstead’s announcement later today.

Our usual warning: Keep in mind that this is a beta release, and as with any other pre-production release, caution should be taken when installing on production level systems or systems with critical data.

Thank you to all who’ve tested Connector/ODBC 5.1 so far! And, obviously, we welcome more testing.

References:

• Connector/ODBC 5.1 Download: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/5.1.html
• My September 2007 blog Re-engineered ODBC 5.1 driver for MySQL: http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2007/09/11/re-engineered-odbc-51-driver-for-mysql/
• MySQL Connector/ODBC documentation http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/myodbc-connector.html (it’s being extended from ODBC 3.51 only to cover also ODBC 5.1)

Ruby on Rails 2.0 was released last week, “It’s done!“, David Heinemeier Hansson notes.

Ruby on Rails has come a long way since Lenz Grimmer’s interview with DHH in February 2006.

Browsing DHH’s blog, I find snippets (bolding mine) like

Piggy-backing off the new drive for resources are a number of simplifications for controller and view methods that deal with URLs.

As you might have gathered, Action Pack in Rails 2.0 is all about getting closer with HTTP and all its glory.

We’ve also made it much easier to structure your JavaScript and stylesheet files in logical units without getting clobbered by the HTTP overhead of requesting a bazillion files.

Making it even easier to create secure applications out of the box is always a pleasure and with Rails 2.0 we’re doing it from a number of fronts.

Figuring out where your bottlenecks are with real usage can be tough, but we just made it a whole lot easier with the new request profiler that can follow an entire usage script and report on the aggregate findings.

Seems to me like Rails 2.0 goes further still in the direction of the RoR tagline “Web development that doesn’t hurt” and its expanded version

Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that’s optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.

Congratulations, DHH and the Rails Team!

References:

• Rails 2.0: It’s done!: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done
• Wikipedia on Ruby on Rails: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_Rails
• http://www.rubyonrails.org/
• Lenz Grimmer’s interview with David Heinemeier Hansson: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/david-heinemeier-hansson-rails.html

Followers of the Forum Nokia Developer Discussion Boards saw interesting pre-announcements last month:

Nokia has ported MySQL and PHP to Symbian.

With 165 million cumulative Symbian smartphones shipped since the formation of Symbian and currently 134 Symbian smartphone models commercially available, it would be interesting to see the effects on the 8,134 third-party Symbian applications commercially available by what Nokia calls “PAMP”.

Availability is planned for next month, at the CCNC 2008 (Fifth IEEE Consumer Communications &Networking Conference, 10 - 12 January 2008 in Las Vegas, Nevada).

Johan Wikman of Nokia, who has already ported the Apache web server to Nokia S60, writes in a Forum Nokia thread (emphasis mine):

I can now reveal that we at the CCNC conference in Las Vegas in January, 2008 will demonstrate and release what we call the PAMP stack.

PAMP stands for Personal Apache, MySQL, PHP, so yes, the full LAMP stack will be made available for S60 smart phones. In addition, there will be PHP extension modules that provide access to the core functionality of the phone. And on top of PAMP you can basically install any LAMP based content management system. For instance, Drupal can be installed off the shelf.

Yes, a fair amount of memory is needed and it’s still pretty experimental stuff, but it runs quite nicely on E90.

So, if you are in the neighbourhood, join us in Las Vegas

Johan

Richard Bloor comments in Symbian Blogs (again, emphasis mine):

At first sight this may seem like an example of porting just to prove it can be done. It does, however, have the potential to create a whole new way of looking at Web application. For example, I’ve recently been evaluating a number of GTD applications. Several of these use PHP and MySQL and it will be interesting to see if they work on PAMP.

As such PAMP could add yet another option for developers to create S60 applications and create a new paradigm for the “off-line” Web. Hopefully by January I’ll have an S60 device with the memory to run this baby.

Sources:

• Symbian Fast Facts: http://www.symbian.com/about/fastfacts/fastfacts.html
• CCNC 2008: http://www.ieee-ccnc.org/2008/
• Nokia Research Center, Mobile Web Server: http://research.nokia.com/research/projects/mobile-web-server/
• PHP running on Mobile Web Server: http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=102803
• Getting Things Done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTD, applications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_GTD_software#Tools_and_Techniques
• S60 blogs: http://blogs.s60.com/mws/2007/11/hot_news_php_coming_to_s60.html
• Symbian Blogs / Richard Bloor, “Your S60 Web server gets a boost”: http://www.symbianone.com/content/view/5064/

Perhaps its time for me to upgrade my phone?

One of the most appreciated keynotes at the ongoing Japanese MySQL Users Conference was by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby language.

Me and Matz at MySQL UC Japan Day 1 2007-09-11

Matz was preceded by an impressive set of keynoters, moderated by MySQL K.K. President Larry Stefonic, also Senior Vice President of Asia Pacific at MySQL AB :

• His Excellency Mr. Stefan Noreén, Ambassador of Sweden to Japan
• Mårten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB
• Masahiko Yoshida-san, Director, Hewlett-Packard Japan, Ltd.
• Kenji Mukai-san, Vice President, General Manager, IT Architecture Solutions Unit, Sumisho Computer Systems Corporation
• Hirokazu Seto-san, Senior Manager, Alliance & Solutions, Marketing & Operations, Dell Inc.

Matz carries the title of Fellow at Network Applied Communication Laboratory Ltd. For the predominantly business oriented audience, Matz described the history of Free Software, of Open Source, and of Ruby, mentioning the mandatory names: Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Linus Torvalds, and, for Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson. With Linus, Matz shares the original motivation for starting their respective now-famous Free Software project: Fun!

The presentation was a great success and even Matz’s jokes were translated into English, creating a time-delayed wave of laughter in the non-Japanese part of the audience. I wonder whether my own afternoon session in English will be equally well treated, when translated into Japanese.

MySQL is today releasing a new ODBC driver, under the version number ODBC 5.1. It is a partial rewrite of the the original MyODBC 3.51 code base, originally developed by Monty and Venu Anuganti, including individual parts of the current 65K ODBC 5 code base. It is designed to work with all MySQL versions starting with MySQL 4.1.

The original ODBC 3.51 driver was incomplete and admittedly somewhat of a quick hack, containing some debatable code. For that reason, Connector/ODBC 5 started as a complete rewrite. After 2 years it had 65 KLOC, but no tests and was in part overdesigned. That project was started but never finished, and had some deep Qt dependencies.

In the meantime, the original ODBC 3.51 has had 6 new releases and over 200 bugs fixed. As for ODBC 5.1, debatable parts of the code have been rewritten. The new ODBC 5.1 driver thus shares almost solely its major version number with the old ODBC 5 driver, which never went past Beta stage. The development of the old ODBC 5 driver has now stopped.

The new ODBC 5.1 driver, like 3.51, supports all relevant platforms (including Win64). While ODBC mostly is relevant for Windows, we have some (but not many) Linux based ODBC users.

Overall, ODBC 3.51 (released as 3.51.20) is now in a better state than ever. The ODBC QA team has written several hundred new tests. Without doubt, the 3.51 code base is now a good fundament for the new ODBC 5.1 version.

ODBC 3.51 supports a subset of the ODBC Core interface, plus some Level 1 and Level 2 features. ODBC 5.1 should be a complete implementation of the ODBC Core interface, plus more Level 1 and 2 features.

We aren’t going to reach complete Level 1 conformance because we won’t be supporting asynchronous execution. and we won’t support SQLProcedureColumns() as we at this point cannot get stored procedure parameter info from the server.

The stumbling blocks for full level 2 conformance are in/out and out parameters, and bookmarks, related to MySQL Server.

New features include Unicode support, and descriptors for connectors and metadata as required by Level 3. The following features are already supported in ODBC 5.1.0

• Support for SQL_C_WCHAR.
• Support for Unicode functions (SQLConnectW, etc.)
• Descriptor support (SQLGetDescField, SQLGetDescRec, etc.)

Before ODBC 5.1 goes beta, you can expect the following functions

• Replace installer library with new implementation (from ODBC 5.0 tree)
• Implement native Windows setup library
• Implement native Mac OS X setup library
• Replace OPTIONS flags with individual DSN settings (but support OPTIONS for backwards-compatibility)
• Fix support for SQLBIGINT (Bug #28887):
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms714121.aspx
• Make diagnostics support standards-compliant:
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms711021.aspx
• Support for SQL_ATTR_METADATA_ID:
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms716447.aspx
• Support for SQL_NUMERIC_STRUCT:
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms714556.aspx
• Implement SQLBrowseConnect():
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms714565.aspx
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms712446.aspx
• Implement SQLCancel() (Bug #15601):
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms714112.aspx
• Implement arrays of parameters:
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms711818.aspx

MySQL has a number of beta customers identified by the Support team. They represent user bases for which Unicode is interesting. From the Community of MySQL users, we are looking for testers who can expand upon the quality assurance done inside MySQL, which is based on automated tests.

Especially, we’re looking for beta testers who work with closed source applications like Microsoft Access, PowerBuilder, and Borland tools. Testers should contact Lenz Grimmer or Kaj Arnö in the MySQL community team (at firstname@mysql.com), who will establish the contact between the ODBC team and the beta testers.

In his OSCON keynote last Thursday (26 July 2007), Bill Hilf of Microsoft described his perspective of the “two steps forward, one step backward” relationship between Microsoft and the world of Open Source. Amongst the steps forward, I count the establishment of a web site microsoft.com/opensource, releasing some Microsoft software under an OSI compliant license, and — specifically to MySQL — the mentioning of the MySQL Connector for Visual Studio in his OSCON presentation.

Microsoft seems to be acknowledging that there is a heterogeneous world out there. It’s not “all proprietary” versus “all Open Source”. The community mixes and matches at will.

Many might think there are few commonalities between MySQL and Microsoft. But there are more than you’d think, and they’re not limited to the common first letter of the alphabet.

The biggest commonality is WAMP. A simple real-world observation is that plenty of the organisations deploying LAMP applications, have developed them in whole or in part under WAMP.

MySQL doesn’t have a platform agenda, so we want to make WAMP easy to use. If WAMP turns out to be good enough not just for development, but also for deployment, great! And there MySQL and Microsoft have a common interest: Making WAMP attractive enough for production deployments, as opposed to being a mere playing ground for LAMP as The Real Thing.

So while you can expect MySQL to continue to want to excel as the M in LAMP, and while I suspect it’s a safe bet to expect Microsoft to continue to have a platform agenda, I don’t think anybody should expect a dogmatic, black and white, all-or-nothing world. In reality, customers and users mix and match, and it’s about time we all acknowledge that.

Bill Hilf made two points in his OSCON keynote that I’d like to comment upon as for how they apply to MySQL. In both cases, I’ll conclude with a plea to contact me, if the thinking applies to you.

First, he pointed out the order-of-magnitude technical improvements that could very simply be made to the interface between IIS and PHP, once key IIS developers were connecting with key PHP developers. Such opportunities for improvements exist only if the products have been living in complete isolation from each other. And that’s not the case with MySQL and Windows, which have peacefully coexisted since last century. This means that the technical fruits to be picked when making WAMP more attractive won’t hang quite that low. But we do know that there are technical hurdles to overcome, and documentation to be improved, specifically when it relates to deployment of WAMP applications. Should you be one of the casualties thereof, I’d love to hear from you about how we should make WAMP more attractive. Email me at firstname@mysql.com!

Second, he pointed to the fear of the unknown, to the extent Linux is unknown to the Microsoft user base. “Can I go visit a Linux website?” was one of the questions he had been asked, not tongue-in-cheek, but for real. My take on this is that there is a perceived divide “Microsoft vs. Open Source” bigger than the divide out in the real world of IT. And I don’t think it’s in the interest of the user base to be lead to believe that solutions have to be fundamentalist. Paradoxically, I don’t even think it’s in Microsoft’s interest. I think the world’s perception of MySQL’s user base may be skewed towards LAMP rather than WAMP, not just because L, A, M and P are all Open Source as opposed to W, but also because of a relative lack of acknowledgement for WAMP as a development (and deployment) stack. Should you have deployed large WAMP apps, I’d love to hear from you about WAMP specific success stories. Email me at firstname@mysql.com!

I can see history repeating itself in strange ways. In the early days, many picked MySQL “for development and testing only”, fully convinced to deploy on other databases (and that was definitely the case with myself in the 1990s). But the “testing” phase dragged on and on, and in many cases MySQL turned out to be “good enough” for deployment.

That’s how MySQL grew.

With proper attention from MySQL, Microsoft and our respective communities, perhaps WAMP in a growing number of scenarios can enjoy the same benefit of being “good enough for deployment”?

MySQL welcomes external verification by high-volume LAMP websites of the performance improvements gained by replacing libmysql with mysqlnd.

To recap some basics from the mysqlnd download page at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php-mysqlnd/:

The MySQL native driver for PHP is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 5 and PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or newer. It is a replacement for the libmysql, the MySQL Client Library. From now on you can use ext/mysqli either together with libmysql as you did in the past or with mysqlnd.

We have no plans to remove libmysql support from ext/mysqli, which would break existing applications. We just add a new, superior alternative to our PHP offerings.

For development discussion and bug reporting a new mailing list has been created php@lists.mysql.com. See also http://lists.mysql.com/.

Georg Richter has now sent the PHP extensions for mysqlnd to the PHP Core Team for reviewing. The interfaces to PHP may then be put directly into the PHP CVS repository, whereas mysqlnd remains to be downloaded from MySQL’s download site.

The code base of mysqlnd has been synchronised with the PHP CVS repository of php.net. While mysqlnd was originally designed for PHP 6, Andrey Hristov has now finished the backport of mysqlnd to PHP 5 and added support for ext/mysql. Given that 60 % of the PHP user base is still on PHP 4, some heavy PHP users would like to see the backporting done all the way to PHP 4. We are evaluating that, but have no immediate plans for such a backport.

Our next ambition is to prove that mysqlnd is stable and meets the need of the most demanding PHP users. And that is where we need help from the user community. We are looking for testers among PHP users with a high server load, ideally willing to do benchmarks.

Typically, mysqlnd is at least as fast as libmysql. We are writing a MySQL Technical Whitepaper with further details on the performance of mysqlnd, which will be published soon. The document confirms previously published results for the Dell DVD Store, which show ext/mysqli with mysqlnd to be about 5% faster than libmysql. Now, we would like an external verification of our performance improvements, but a small web site is not proof enough, as differences will show up only under high load. We are curious to learn how big the overall speed-up is for a top web site, given that the time spent in the database interface is only a fraction of the overall web page generation time.

Our team has increased their Quality Assurance efforts to further stabilise mysqlnd. Code Coverage analysis with GCOV shows that our tests cover 88% of the underlying ext/mysql C-code, 93% of ext/mysqli and 83% of mysqlnd. We are proud of our improved figures. If you want to compare the values to those of PHP 4.4 and 5.2, check out http://gcov.php.net/.

Due to the help of Kent Boortz in the MySQL Build Team, we are building mysqlnd routinely on 28 platforms. We have run our test suite against more than 20 MySQL Server versions. Still, the positive lab tests need to be confirmed by field usage, quite as the performance figures.

So if you run a high load web site based on PHP and MySQL,

(i) read up on how to get mysqlnd, how to install it, and on the features & limitations as well as the FAQ on the download page

(ii) subscribe to php@lists.mysql.com at http://lists.mysql.com/

(iii) talk to Jay Pipes (at firstname@mysql.com) or Ulf Wendel (at firstname.lastname@mysql.com)! Or, better still, catch them on IRC (#mysql-dev on Freenode).

Lately, it has been popular on blogs and elsewhere to portray the relationship between open source and closed source as a non-fight.

• In The Beautiful Game, Bryan Kirschner (who leads research strategy for the Open Source Software Lab of Microsoft) blogs about the MySQL User’s Conference and shares his thinking about why Microsoft and MySQL are working together on a number of applications, including ADO.NET provider Interop, and a Visual Studio plug-in that enables developers to access MySQL data directly from VS.
• In The “it’s not us versus them” meme, Matt Asay (influential Open Source thinker and blogger) describes how Microsoft increasingly point out that “it’s not open source versus proprietary” meme. He argues that it would normally be the new player, not the incumbent player, who one should expect to use this type of argument.

Whatever the reason for anybody to claim it’s not us versus them, I think the winner is the end user — as long as the claim is backed up by actions.

For MySQL, let me say that we’ve humbly done our best to take actions. We’ve worked with Microsoft operating systems and applications since last century. Not long after the release of MySQL (originally under Solaris, then under Linux), the software was released under the Windows operating system. Furthermore, we released an ODBC driver coded in-house; as for connectors to many popular Open Source languages, they’ve been developed by the community, not by MySQL itself. And fast forwarding to this century, we beat Microsoft SQL Server by releasing an ADO.Net driver for MySQL Server quicker than MSFT themselves for MSSQL. This is for the good of the end user, who gets more choice and more opportunities inside the Microsoft ecosystem.

With Microsoft (through Port 25) being a sponsor at the MySQL Conference & Expo, and having met Bryan Kirschner and Jamie M. Cannon (both of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft), I am happy to see that Microsoft is starting to acknowledge MySQL’s importance for the Microsoft ecosystem. “As commercial software companies, MySQL and Microsoft share substantial common ground.”, Bryan says in his blog. There seems to be something positive to what MySQL can do for Microsoft customers, also from the perspective of Microsoft itself.

When it comes to Microsoft and MySQL working together, I think there is more in store for the end user. With official contacts established between the two companies, new ideas are getting floated. Some of them may fly. Expect to hear more later!