Lenz Grimmer's blog

So you're a small startup company, ready to go live with your product, which you intend to distribute under an Open Source License. Congratulations, you made a wise decision! Your developers have been hacking away frantically, getting the code in good shape for the initial launch. Now it's time to look into what else needs to be built and setup, so you're ready to welcome the first members of your new community and to ensure they are coming back!

Keep the following saying in mind, which especially holds true in the Open Source world: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression!". While the most important thing is of course to have a compelling and useful product, this blog post is an attempt to highlight some other aspects about community building and providing the adequate infrastructure. This insight is based on my own experiences and my observations from talking with many people involved in OSS startups and projects.

Just came off today's MySQL University session about How to Build MySQL on Windows - Reggie did a great job on explaining how to build the MySQL Server from Source on Windows using the Microsoft development toolchain and some additional required tools. I am glad to hear that we're making progress on making it easier for Windows developers to work with the source code and Reggie and the other members of our Windows Task Force (what a nice acronym this one makes!) have plenty of other ideas for improving that experience.

If you missed his session, the audio file and IRC log will be published from the MySQL University pages shortly.

And in case you haven't heard about MySQL University before, check out the pages on the MySQL Forge and take a look at the upcoming schedule! Next week, Jan is going to give an introduction to the MySQL Proxy, which will to be an interesting session for sure. Did I mention that attending MySQL University is free and everybody is welcome to join? All you need is an IRC client to post questions and discuss the topic and an application capable of playing OGG audio streams for listening to the presenter. The MySQL Forge Wiki has detailed instructions on how to get going. See you next week!

Just stumbled over this article, which might come in handy for our Microsoft Office users out there: "Using Excel to analyze MySQL data" by Jason Gilmore explains how to set up the MySQL Connector/ODBC and connecting to a MySQL database using Microsoft Excel.

If you're a Linux user, this article on NewsForge covers a similar topic, using OpenOffice.org

to connect to a MySQL Server.

Update: Thanks to Guillermo Roditi for pointing out that both links pointed to the same article - now fixed. Sorry about that.

Last week I was notified that my article about how to install and configure MySQL and the MySQL Connector/J was published in the Java Starter Magazine, a special edition of the german Java Magazin. It covers the basic installation of MySQL and Connector/J on Windows and Linux and how to write a small example program to connect to to MySQL with Java using the Eclipse framework. They were kind enough to send me a number of copies that I plan to give away at tonight's Hamburg MySQL User Group Meeting.

Some of you may remember a GUI tool named MySQLFront written by Ansgar Becker, a shareware tool for Windows to administrate a MySQL server. The development stopped with version 2.5 in September 2002, because Ansgar no longer had the time to further drive the development. About a year later, the name (not the code) was taken over by Nils Hoyer, who started to develop and sell a product similar in functionality under that name. See this page (in german) for a more detailed history.

Back then, many people had asked Ansgar to turn his work into an Open Source project, which he declined to do (as it would probably have required even more time to maintain properly than just doing the development all by himself).

The good news is that Ansgar revised his decision now: HeidiSQL is the new name of his GUI tool (based on the original MySQLFront 2.5 code base), which has now been released under the GPL! The Delphi/Kylix source code is now available via the SourceForge SVN, new binaries will be released shortly (a few bug fixes have already been applied). A discussion forum is available, too.

I'd like to congratulate Ansgar to this step - I am sure that there are still many enthusiasts of the "old" MySQLFront around that will be excited to learn about this new development. All the best for your project and thanks for enriching the Open Source ecosystem around MySQL!

MySQL 5.0.19 was announced on March 10th and the developers have been very busy with resolving many of the bugs that were reported. Something that did not really get much attention because of all these changes was the fact that we now provide binaries for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 (AMD64/Intel EM64T) as well!
If you run the 64bit version of this OS, give these binaries a try and let us know how they fared for you! Kudos to the build team for making these happen.