Colin Charles Agenda

Calling all students!

Here’s an easy way to make USD$500 (grand prize), or USD$250 (five runners up). All you have to do is use the MySQL database (5.1) and the GlassFish application server (v2 Update Release 2) to develop a cool web application and write a review of your experience using these products.

The deadline for this is October 22, 2008. Remember to read the contest details, as it lists eligibility criteria, and how we’re judging the entries.

As a judge, here’s my advice:

• Make me go “wow!”
• Use some of the new features in MySQL 5.1 – think XML, event scheduler, table logging, etc.
• Make it ridiculously easy for me to judge the application – good documentation is going to help, but if the application itself is intuitive, it’d rock harder
• There’s no time limit you need to spend… 5 hours for ace coders, 20 hours for average coders… its up to you. Extra effort, usually means you’ll get a high rank

If you want to get started quickly, there’s a NetBeans IDE 6.1 with GlassFish and MySQL bundle. It only comes with MySQL 5.0, so you’ll still have to get MySQL 5.1, but that should be a piece of cake. NetBeans is after all, a seriously good IDE.

At a university? Got a notice board? Go ahead, and print the flyer. Spread the love.

Good luck!

Robin just wrote a new article, titled A Quick Look at MySQL 6.0’s New Backup, and I thought, that maybe you’d like to also see this in presentation/video format…

At OSCON, Giuseppe actually gave a quick talk at the Sun booth, about our online backup. He also showed how to use it. All examples there, were done with the test-db sample database.

(MySQL Online Backup in Practice, video if the above doesn’t appear)

Malaysian Airlines has impressed me, yet again. Last week, in The Star, they reported that Sharul Isahak, a MAS employee, has helped save the airlines close to RM70 million (about USD$21 million), thanks to his use of open source software.

The software is meant to help airline maintenance, i.e. to keep track of parts and records of maintenance works. The web-based solution, is E-Promis (read the blog entry, its pretty interesting, as he takes you through the planning stages – it also seems like he’s still the only developer).

“This meant looking at open-source solutions. Instead of platforms such as Microsoft or Sun, we chose LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)”

I couldn’t help but grin inside, a little. After all, Sun do own the M in LAMP ;-)

Next up, wonder if they will open source it, ala MyMeeting? After all, MAS services AirAsia and JetStar planes, I wonder who else will benefit from such software.

Excited with the release of the MySQL Connector/C++, I thought I’d get it going on Mac OS X.

You’ll first hit the problem that Mac OS X doesn’t come with CMake. So you’ll have to download it from the site – there’s a warning there that the .dmg installer only works for Tiger, but I ran it on Leopard, and its just fine. Don’t forget to allow it to create links in /usr/bin for ease of use.

After that, you will need to install glib. But to get glib going, you need some dependencies:

• gettext
• pkgconfig
• and then glib

Installing them is simple: untar (tar -zxvpf package.tar.gz), ./configure, make, then a sudo make install.

Now, the README file or the instructions on the wiki will just work. I have several MySQL installations, so I preferred to specify what cmake found. I did this by:
cmake -D MYSQL_DIR:PATH=/usr/local/mysql/ -D GLIB_DIR:PATH=/usr/local/lib/glib-2.0/ .

Then a simple make, and you can go on and try the examples, in examples/. Try the connect application to make sure things are working. You will probably run into a snag though:


luna:examples ccharles$ ./connect
Connector/C++ connect basic usage example..

ERR: MySQL_DbcException in /Users/ccharles/code/mysql_connector_cpp_1_0_0_preview/examples/connect.cpp((function n/a)) on line 159
ERR: Cannot connect (MySQL error code: 0 )

Take a look at examples/examples.h, and look at the connection properties. It uses the test database, on localhost (127.0.0.1), standard port 3306, user is root, and the default password set there is root too. This may not be the commonest setting, so don’t hesitate to change the password or leave it blank (ala a default install), and rerun make. The sample applications will now work :)

Congratulations to Andrey, Ulf, and the rest of the connectors team in getting this going!

Michael Widenius, commonly referred to as Monty, gave a very interesting talk on Maria at OSCON 2008. He not only had a talk in the main session, that was well attended, titled Architecture of Maria, the New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL (slides are available in ODP there), he also gave one at the Sun booth, where we were running our own little “unconference”.

For those reading this in a feed reader, there’s a 23 minute video of Monty telling us more about Maria, a bit about its motivations, architecture, and where the team is at now. If you’re interested in grabbing the code, check out the MySQL + Maria Storage Engine branch on Launchpad.

Whether an online comic, or not, the New Straits Times is one of the three English dailies, that still cost some amount of money in Malaysia. Their Computimes pullout, now better known as Tech&U, featured Raj Kissu, a Summer of Code 2008 participant for MySQL. While the article itself, fails to mention MySQL, he describes what he’s working on:

I’m doing a project on binary large objects in database. Basically, it is aimed at allowing people to file or stream files online. The program is based on open source.

Kudos to Raj, kudos to Google, kudos to phpMyAdmin, and kudos to MySQL. As for the reporter, as usual, old medium journalism tends to be somewhat of a fail….