I get asked this question often. It was mentioned again recently in a NYTECH executive breakfast with RedHat CIO Lee Congdon.
The short answer is No.
There is clear evidence that in the short to medium term Oracle will continue to promote and enhance MySQL. Some of these indicators include:

It is clear from these sources that Oracle intends to incorporate MySQL into Oracle Backup and Security Vault products. Both a practical and necessary step. There is also a clear mention of focusing on the Microsoft platform, a clear indicator that SQL Server is in their sights without actually saying it.
What is unknown is exact how and when features will be implemented. Also important is how much these may cost the end user. Oracle is in the business of selling, now an entire H/W and S/W stack. They also have a complicated pricing model of different components with product offerings. I assume this will continue. There are already two indications, InnoDBbackup included for Enterprise Backup (from April Keynote) and 5.1 enterprise split. (Note: while this split may have existed prior to Oracle, it is now more clearly obvious).
MySQL can never be seen as drawing away from any Oracle sales of the core entry level database product. It is likely Oracle will provide a SQL Syntax compatibility layer for MySQL within 2 years, however it will I’m sure be a commercial add-on. Likewise, I would suspect a PL/SQL lite layer within 5 years, but again at a significant cost to offset the potential loss of sales in the low end of the server market. There continues to be active development in the MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Workbench and MySQL Connectors which is all excellent news for users.
Moving forward, how long will this ancillary development of free tools continue? What will happen to the commercial storage engine, OEM and licensing model after the 5 year commitment? How will the MySQL ecosystem survive.? There is active development in Percona, MariaDB and Drizzle forks, however unless all players that want to provide a close MySQL compatible solution work together, progress will continue to be a disappointing disjointed approach. The 2011 conference season will also see a clear line with competing MySQL conferences in April scheduled at the same time, the O’Reilly MySQL conference in Santa Clara California and the Oracle supported(*) Collaborate 2011 in Orlando, Florida.
I have a number of predictions on what Oracle ME MySQL may look like in 5 years however this is a topic for a personal discussion.

Only Valid Measure of Code Quality

Image from http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

WTF implies lack of clarity. Clear code is easier to understand, easier to maintain and easier to extend.

Announcing saikuro_treemap ? an easy to setup tool to generate complexity treemaps of ruby code.

See a demo for yourself.

Complexity Visualization of Rake

Head on over to http://lca2011.linux.org.au/ and check it out!
You’ve got until August 7th to put in a paper, miniconf, poster or tutorial.
Things I’d like to see come from my kinda world:

If you wonder why there hasn’t been an update from me for quite a while — I just returned from two months of paternal leave, in which I actually managed to stay away from the PC most of the time. In the meanwhile, I’ve officially become an Oracle employee and there is a lot of administrative things to take care of… But it feels good to be back!

As we need to finalize the schedule and inform the speakers, the voting period will close this coming Sunday, 18th of July. So don’t hesitate, cast your votes now! Based on your feedback we will compile the session schedule for this year’s camp. Thanks for your help!

One of the great things about Eclipse is that?unlike the celestial event and the unfortunately-named movie?everybody gets to see it; regardless of your location on earth, you have access to Eclipse.

But, like Linus, some people are confused as to the nature of Eclipse. To try and help people better understand Eclipse, I?ve created a ?What is Eclipse?? talk that takes an audience step-by-step from what is commonly understood through a voyage of discovery of the true greatness of Eclipse. More specifically, I start by introducing Eclipse as a Java IDE. This is generally easy for the sorts of audiences that I speak with to understand: folks in the software industry understand IDEs (though there are still a few emacs hermits out there; and I mean ?hermit? in a wholly-endearing way). I spend the next couple of slides broadening the technical horizon by introducing Eclipse as a platform for building IDEs, tools, desktop applications, server applications and runtimes, and more.

All this technology is wonderful. But technology is only part of the Eclipse not-so-secret sauce. All of that technology comes from the many open source projects at Eclipse.

We have a lot of projects at Eclipse. A lot of projects. Up to this point in the presentation, most of the discussion has been around just a small handful of projects. The ?Eclipse? Project is responsible for creating most of what people think of when they think of Eclipse. Specifically, the Eclipse Project creates what we try very hard to consistently refer to as the ?Eclipse SDK? (that is, a software development kit for building Eclipse-based applications). The Eclipse Project leverages the work of several other projects (Equinox comes immediately to mind) to provide important bits of information, but most of the bits that people think of when they think ?Eclipse is a Java IDE? comes from the Eclipse Project.

Now this is where things start to get a little weird. The Eclipse Project is what we call a ?Top-Level Project?. It is?effectively?a container for several smaller-scale projects. Each of these smaller scale projects, often referred to as simply ?projects? or ?subprojects?) is a distinct entity that contributes parts to the greater whole. The Platform Project, for example, produces the UI, workbench, and many other fundamental services and frameworks; the Java development tools (JDT) project produces the Java compiler, editors, debugger, and such; the Plugin-Development Environment (PDE) produces tools to aid in the construction of plug-ins; and more. All these Projects have distinct development teams, web sites, and other resources.

The Eclipse Project is just one of the top-level projects at Eclipse. There are currently twelve top-level projects that organize dozens of projects. Top-level projects provide more than simple organization of projects. Each top-level project has a ?Project Management Committee? (PMC) that is responsible for providing oversight and guidance to the projects in their care. Each top-level project is a little different from the others, reflecting different values and technical areas. Some top-level projects tightly organize their projects; others allow greater levels of flexibility.

The fact of the matter is that we have a heck of a lot of projects at Eclipse. At last count we had more than 250 projects (I can hear you gasp at that number). The project is the finest-grained organizational unit at Eclipse. Each project has its own group of developers (called ?committers?), its own website, forums, mailing lists, source code repositories, downloads and more. Some projects provide aggregations of other projects; a project can, for example, have subprojects of its own.

It?s left to the project teams to decide how they want to organize. Typically, mid-level projects tend to be used to provide some hierarchical organization for related projects. Very often mid-level projects (and top-level projects in some cases) provide handy aggregate builds and downloads of the software produced by the projects they contain. The Web Tools Platform Project, much like the Eclipse Project, is a good example of this. Web Tools contains multiple separate projects (e.g. Dali and EJB Tools), but distributes downloads and updates under the top-level project. As an outsider-looking-in, Web Tools comes across as a single source of software (the fact that it is really multiple projects under the covers is a bit of an implementation detail).

So anyway? we have a lot of projects. They?re organized under top-level projects that provide oversight and guidance. Chances are very good that we have something going on at Eclipse that interests you.

But Eclipse is more than just technology and projects. Eclipse is? a Community.

This is my 2 cents in the Open Source vs. Open Code vs. Commercial debate. And it’s a long one…Maybe some of you reading this are offended already, but bear with me, I’ll get there. The way I see the Open Source model, having worked with OSS at MySQL for 6+ years now, is that this is a great way of developing software. Not brilliant, but great, but I’ll get there also.Users of OSS, in my mind, are OSS users for one or more of three reasons:It’s Open – The users using OSS for this reason believes that being open is in and of itself a great thing, enough so to use OSS even when non-OSS is less expensive and/or better.Cost – OSS is typically less expensive than non-OSS, and this is the reason these users get here. There are then 2 subgroups here, one that represents users that just aren’t funded at all, many websites are in this category, the users building Joomla and Drupal sites and the like, I think you get the point. The second group are those that have funding, but would rather spend their money on luxury items and a new car than of a software license.Technology – This is a category that many think they are in, but I don’t think this is mostly not the case. These are the users on a unique piece of software that is either not existing as non-OSS, or where the OSS variations are so much more powerful than the commercial counterparts. In all honesty, although I am aware these cases exist, I do not think that that there are THAT many. But there are those there Cost + Technology plays in, i.e. even though a commercial option exists, it is just too expensive.OK, so now we know (what I think) are the reasons that Open Source exists, is in wide use and is growing. For the first group, the ones that see Openness as a good enough reason in and of itself, I think this is a smaller group of the total number of users. But that openness is not really, in my mind, well defined.If Oracle would take the sourcecode for the Oracle database and release it under GPL, then it would be Open in most peoples mind I guess. But that piece of code is massive, and few people outside the Oracle developers would have the time, resources and knowledge to understand, extend and modify it, so what how Open is it really then? I think to an extent MySQL is case in point here, although it is GPL licenced and the sourcecode is open and free, there are few outside contributors, as compared to the large number of users. I think most users building a website using Drupal cares much about MySQL being open or closed or whatever. I think most of them care about the cost being low. And one sure could argue that low cost comes from the source being open, that is probably true to a large extent, but that doesn’t mean that commercial software or non-OSS also can be low cost (shareware for example).What this boils down to, in my mind then, is that although we all enjoy the low cost of OSS, less care about it really being open and if so how, and more about it being inexpensive. And I say that as someone who doesn’t actually mind reading sourcecode, and this is something I do on a regular basis, read and sometimes tinker with the MySQL source. But I really do not think that I am typical here.And all this is not to say that there is something wrong with OSS, quite the opposite, but often it is more about cost than actual openness. And this is worrying, but there are exceptions. Linux is one such example, although the kernel is since long ago developed by a rather small closely knit community, utilities and programs surrounding and extending the kernel, such as modules, the GNU packages and that stuff, are developed separately from this group, by individuals or groups of them with specific needs or knowledge. The key here is the open interfaces. You don’t have to understand every aspect of the Linux kernel to develop a well working and efficient utility or even kernel module.But I do not think that even Linux is developed enough in this area as I would like it to see. To me, who really believe that Open Source Software is a good thing and an excellent model for development, I would like to see an even more “contributor friendly” architecture. I think Unix got a long way here in it’s early days, with the principles of simple and easy to use APIs (like pipes) and programs could do one hing and do it well. But those days are gone now, that was 30 – 40 years ago or so, and we need to develop things, and I haven’t seen that happening. FSF and GPL and all that defines to extent the framework for distributed software in terms of legalities and many other aspects, but there is little help in how to make the software that can now in theory be read by anyone truly open. If we assume that Oracle made their sourcecode GPL, but did not provide any documentation on how the sourcecode works (which is not a requirement of GPL) and removed all the sourcecode comments (which is not a requirement either), how open would that be, really? I do not think it would help much in terms of openness, to be honest. Sure, it would be open for someone who wanted to hickjack some intricate part of the Oracle sourcecode, but that would need a large investment in investigating the code, so this would probably only be reasonable for a some other large corporate entity. But the code would really be open for the rest of us.Instead of discussing Open Source vs. Open Code vs. Commercial, I think it would be much more interesting to discuss how we develop software that truly is contributor friendly. Code that is easy to add to, code that lives in an environment where changes and additions can easily be made, reviewed and tested. Code that allows itself to be built by anyone, anywhere so that I can test my code on a 16 CPU x86 box somewhere in australia, provided by a nice person I don’t even know, although I am located in Sweden. Code that is required to have proper commenting, proper structured APIs and natural points for injecting new and changed code. And above all, code that lets someone with excellent domain knowledge (in for example indexing algorithms, GIS, text search, APIs, disk management etc., if we talk about databases) to write code and test, without being a database expert or even knowing the inner details of the system he/she writes code in, and not being brilliant developers themselves.Is this a dream? Maybe, Is Drizzle the answer (I know someone will suggest that), and I say no, it’s just not enough, it’s just more of the same (plugins), it doesn’t really provide anything new in how we develop things or how those developments are published and distributed.In short, I think the Open Source vs. Open Code debate is just nitpicking and boring. Neither model just isn’t good enough to be truly friendly and open for contribution. The difference lies more in how and with what we we can commercialize our efforts, which is a valid concern, but my main concern, as you can see, is that I believe that neither model is truly open. And I would rather see a truly contributor friendly Open Code model than the current state of affairs./Karlsson

We have been using MySQL 5.1 on a few servers for which partitioning is a much better way to purge old data than delete. We have been working to upgrade more servers despite claims that some of us may have made in the past about using MySQL 4.0 or 5.0 forever.

I am excited about MySQL 5.1 and 5.5. With a few recent changes to the Facebook patch we have been able to increase peak QPS by more than 2X and peak IOPs by more than 3X using benchmarks. There are more improvements to be done. Whether or not we match the benchmark results in production, I much prefer an RDBMS that can exceed 100,000 QPS and IOPs than one that is saturated at 10,000. Any of the changes we make for 5.1 will look even better with MySQL 5.5 given support for multiple InnoDB buffer pool instances and some of the changes above the storage engine layer that aren’t easy to describe in a few sentences.

EllisLab is pleased to release CodeIgniter version 1.7.2 for ready download.  What’s new?  Among other changes:

• Compatible with PHP 5.3.0
• Added a new Cart Class.
• Improvements to the Form helper
• Added is_php() to Common functions to facilitate PHP version comparisons
• Modified show_error() to allow sending of HTTP server response codes, and all internal uses now send proper status codes.
• Numerous bug fixes

Version 1.7.2 has been baking in the subversion for quite some time, and has been compatible with PHP 5.3.0 since late July, but many users understandably haven’t been running from the in-development version.  While I’d have liked to have had time to add a few more “big ticket” items to this release, making it 1.8, time is a cruel mistress.  Many of our users develop on Macs, and OS X Snow Leopard ships with PHP 5.3.0, so we felt is was more important to push out this stable maintenance release instead of waiting for an even later date – it’s been almost seven months since a refresh, afterall.  But there are still a few good surprises, and welcome changes.  Enjoy!

EllisLab is blessed with two of the greatest communities that can be found anywhere on the internet in ExpressionEngine and more recently CodeIgniter.  Despite being a relative newcomer to the scene, the people attracted to CodeIgniter are among the smartest, most talented and down-to-earth developers around today.  From time to time we want to highlight some of these talented people, and we’ve asked them to lend their voice to ours.  Have your voice.  I hope you enjoy what they have to say as much as I did.

This week, our Community Voice author is Bruce Alderson, known on the forums as madmaxx, who has written a wonderful guide on how he uses subversion with CodeIgniter.  Bruce is an elder web monkey and systems programmer.  He totally digs the craft of building software, making cool stuff, and causing people to laugh so hard liquids are forced from their nose.  He’s currently the Chief Monkey at Discovery Software and author of the not-at-all famous robotpony.ca.  (Go read the one about shaving your yak)

After working with CodeIgniter for a few months (and WordPress for a few years), I?ve settled on a way to set up web projects that works well for development, deployment, and source control. Note that this style of layout only works on systems like Mac and Linux that have useful symlinks.

First, the folder layout

The layout favours a vhost setup, and splits your code and resources out of the CodeIgniter sources. Splitting your stuff from the CodeIgniter stuff lets you link your Subversion repository to theirs, so that you can keep it in sync with their development.

How it’s done

1. Set up your source tree (not including the symlinks or CodeIgniter source) and add to your Subversion repo.
2. Add a svn link to CodeIgniter’s repo (via svn propedit svn:externals, with public http://dev.ellislab.com/svn/CodeIgniter/tags/v1.6.2/) and run a svn update to grab the framework.  See the Subversion docs for details.
3. Copy the CI application folder to the site root (as app), remove the .svn folders, symlink to application, and add it to your local svn repo.
4. Symlink the other site-extras to the public webserver root, and configure your local machine (and public webserver) to point to this root for the domain’s virtual host setup.
5. Alternatively, you can modify the $application_path to point to ../public/app/ (I’m not sure which is better yet).  See the CodeIgniter docs on apps for more details.

You now have a CodeIgnitor project ready for development. You can keep up-to-date with CodeIgniter updates, deploy easily, and get at your code without wading through extra levels of hierarchy.

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