On my non-MySQL blog, I just wrote a blog post called “Photo Manager: How do you keep track of your pictures?“. I’m looking for Open Source Software that helps me keep track of my 100,000+ digital pictures. I wrote specs on dreamt-up software called “Robfat” (for rename, order, backup, find, archive, tag) as I want to remove excess fat from my HDs (and CD/DVD cabinets).

And then I thought this may have a MySQL dimension:

What if we had an “EXIF Storage Engine”? What if we could update EXIF tags directly from the MySQL command line, with UPDATE statements, and SELECT picture file names based on tags and other file characteristics?

But beyond this technical aspect, I think many, many MySQL users are avid photographers and may have input about the specs themselves, or even know of existing software that satisfied the needs.

So please go to the blog post and comment!

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting with Per-Ola Sjöswärd, executive IT strategist at the Swedish National Police. That organisation is already way ahead of most of us when it comes to Open Source adoption. But they have higher ambitions still.

The Rikspolisstyrelsen logotype is on many Sun slides, as an example of an “Enterprise 2.0″ type MySQL customer. Besides sounding cool, the ”Enterprise 2.0″ name is supposed to portray what all the organisations in that group have in common: They’re generic enterprises in any industry, and they use the same internal IT architecture as Web 2.0 companies use externally.

The Swedish Police, to be specific, doesn’t use just Web apps internally. But still, we’re talking about a 70% share. The other 30% are based on the Java Swing architecture, so it’s still fairly portable and far away from vendor lock in.

The figure 70% also goes for the share of their IT budget that is allocated towards internal application development. Only 30% of their apps are in areas such as HR or ERP, where generic solutions can be applied. All applications specific to the “industry” of being the police authority have to be tailored to the needs of the Swedish Police, as no generic apps in this area exist.

That, in turn, means that the main headache of their IT and CIO should be the future compliance and maintenance of their own code base. By contrast, the main headache should not be about vendor lock-in or the cost of proprietary licenses. And that is exactly where the Swedish Police is heading: Lack of vendor dependence, very low licensing costs and total cost of ownership through Open Source.

In the CIO corner of mysql.com we have described how Per-Ola took the initiative that led to the Swedish Police having adopted a multi-tiered architecture built on Java Enterprise Edition and Open Source components. That architecture they call LIMBO, for Linux, MySQL and JBoss. Now, they’re taking the next step — migrating their old apps, based on Tuxedo, to LIMBO. This iniative they call “Ren IT”, meaning “Clean IT” — as they’re cleaning up their legacy application architecture.

That’s no small undertaking. We’re talking 33 applications, with a total rewrite effort of 107.000 man hours.

That rewrite effort requires a budget of 9,1 million Euros, which is money that has to be taken from somewhere as it isn’t part of any default budgets. On the other hand, that still represents a huge savings compared to the 21 million Euros they would have to spend just on licenses, proprietary server hardware and maintenance alone (no new functionality!) to hold on to their current Tuxedo solutions, which also includes proprietary operating systems, server hardware and databases.

The Swedish Police is making bold moves, but doing absolutely the right thing with taxpayer money. The savings of over 10 million euros translates to quite a lot of police cars, or full-time police officers concentrating on what the Swedish National Police is in business for.

What a great role model!

MySQL 5.1 is here! It’s announced! And it’s time for the overall winner, Position 1 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

1. Greg Haase (Lotame Solutions Inc., Elkridge, Maryland, USA): Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler to Prune Archive Tables. See Greg’s DevZone article, and his blog.

Thanks and congratulations, Greg! I absolutely hope you are in a position to take advantage of your free MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius.

Links:

• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/18/mysql-51-use-case-competition/
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/08/26/mysql-51-use-case-competition-until-end-of-september
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/partitioning-event_scheduler.html
• http://blog.onefreevoice.com/

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is coming, and for downloading, it’s already available, as I hope you have noticed from Giuseppe’s blog. We continue our preparations, this time by announcing Position 2 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

2. Guy Adams (Parallel Ltd., Milton Keynes, United Kingdom): Using Partitioning to Manage Satellite Networks. See Guy’s DevZone article.

Thanks and congratulations, Guy! I hope you too are in a position to take advantage of your free MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius.

Links:

• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/18/mysql-51-use-case-competition/
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/08/26/mysql-51-use-case-competition-until-end-of-september
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/partitioning_manage_satellite.html

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is getting closer by the minute! So it’s time for Position 3 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

3. Corrado Pandiani (Football Club Internazionale Milano Spa, Milan, Italy): Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler for online logging & real-time stats. See Corrado’s DevZone article, and his blog.

Thanks and congratulations, Corrado! I hope you are in a position to take advantage of your free MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius.

Links:

• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/18/mysql-51-use-case-competition/
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/08/26/mysql-51-use-case-competition-until-end-of-september
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/pandiani-use-case.html
• http://blog.pandiani.com/category/mysqlen/

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is close, so close that we’re seeding the mirrors (I hope you noted Giuseppe’s blog entry)! So it’s time for Position 4 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

4. Volker Oboda (TeamDrive Systems GmbH, Hamburg, Germany): Using the Pluggable API for TeamDrive. See Volker’s DevZone article, and the Wikipedia article on TeamDrive.

Thanks and congratulations, Volker! Your MySQL Community Contributor T-shirt is underway.

Links:

• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/18/mysql-51-use-case-competition/
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/08/26/mysql-51-use-case-competition-until-end-of-september
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/teamdrive_pluggable_api.html

With the GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 coming up, we have picked the winners in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

To keep you in suspense, let me first announce those on positions 5 to 10:

5. Fourat Zouari (TriTUX.com, Tunis, Tunisia): Using Partitioning for Data Warehousing. See Fourat’s DevZone article, and his blog entry from May 2008.

6. Ryan Thiessen (Big Fish Games, Seattle, Washington, USA): Logging Game Downloads with Partitioning. See Ryan’s DevZone article.

7. Christopher Lavigne (Breadboard BI, Inc., Pleasanton, California, USA): Using MySQL 5.1 for Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence. See Christopher’s DevZone article.

8. Jianzy Zhaoyang (Alibaba.com, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China): Using the MySQL 5.1 Event Scheduler for an Online Chat System. When Jian’s ongoing migration is done, he has promised a DevZone article.

9. Jakub Vrána (phpMinAdmin, Prague, Czech Republic): Managing Events in phpMinAdmin. See Lenz Grimmer’s blog entry.

10. Santo Leto (HoneySoftware, Trieste, Italy): 5.1 Use Case Reports. See Santo’s blog entries.

Thanks an congratulations, Fourat, Ryan, Christopher, Jian, Jakub and Santo! Your MySQL Community Contributor T-shirts are underway.

Links:

• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/07/18/mysql-51-use-case-competition/
• http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/08/26/mysql-51-use-case-competition-until-end-of-september
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/tritux_partitioning_datawarehousing.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/big_fish_games_partitioning.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/breadboardbi_data_warehouse.html

Within minutes after Finland was just about to win 3:2 over Germany in the football world championship qualifications (but it ended 3:3), I got a bit of consolation for myself, my dual-citizenship son cheering for Finland, and my fellow countrymen using MySQL:

We have the next MySQL 5.1 Use Case article live, and it’s about FC Inter Milan. No Finns playing there (but stars such as Ibrahimovic, Materazzi, Luis Figo, and Adriano). And, from a MySQL perspective, the interesting point is that FC Inter Milan is using both MySQL 5.1 Partitioning and the Event Scheduler in an innovative way.

Thanks Corrado Pandiani for the story — let’s hope your good Use Case inspires others!

Links:

• FC Inter Milan Using MySQL 5.1 Partitioning and Event Scheduler: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/pandiani-use-case.html
• The MySQL 5.1 Use Case competition: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-5.1-use-case-competition.html
• FC Inter Milan: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter
• Finland-Germany 3:3: http://svenska.yle.fi/nyheter/artikel.php?id=138742

Tomorrow, there’s a particularly interesting MySQL University session coming up: The OpenSolaris Web Stack.

This session is presented by key experts outside the Database Group, but inside Sun:

• Jyri Virkki, lead for OpenSolaris Web Stack community, Sun Microsystems
• Murthy Chintalapati, Web Stack development, Sr Engineering Manager, Sun Microsystems

For practical reasons, this session happens three hours later than normal. To decipher that into a timezone which may be familiar to you, this means 9:00 PST / 16:00 UTC / 17:00 GMT / 18:00 CET.

Abstract:

OpenSolaris Web Stack is an OpenSolaris project and community building an integrated stack of popular open source web tier infrastructure technologies such as Apache HTTP server, MySQL, memcached, PHP and Ruby On Rails optimized for Solaris platform. This session introduces OpenSolaris Web Stack, its status and future development including addition of newer technologies such as lighttpd, Varnish etc., as well as the ease of use features for developers and deployers. We will also be discussing an experimental web stack IPS package repository and it could be leveraged to build and make available popular end user applications such as Drupal.

You don’t have to register, but it certainly is appreciated if you do so, by filling in your name on the session Wiki page. That Wiki page also contains a section to post questions. Please use it!

Those planning to attend a MySQL University session for the very first time should probably read the instructions for attendees.

Finally, you may want to take a look at the complete list of upcoming University sessions.
Links:

• Session Page on Forge Wiki: http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/OpenSolaris_Web_Stack
• MySQL University home page: http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_University
• Upcoming MySQL University Sessions: http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_University#Upcoming_Sessions
• Instructions for MySQL University Attendees: http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Instructions_for_Attendees
• OpenSolaris Project home page: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/webstack/

We’re getting some high quality Use Cases from our user base, related to the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

The first one is by Greg Haase of Lotame, based in Elkridge, Maryland (USA), a company dedicated to providing solutions within social media. His article is about an innovative use of MySQL 5.1 partitioning and Event Scheduler to prune ARCHIVE tables.

There are more articles in the pipeline. And there is still time for you to submit your story by 30 September 2008. We’re all excited to read them, and with your permission, we’ll share them with our user base.

Links:

• Greg Haase’s article Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler to Prune Archive Tables: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/partitioning-event_scheduler.html
• Greg’s blog about Databases and Linux: http://blog.onefreevoice.com/
• The MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition announcement: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-5.1-use-case-competition.html