Busy next few days: Sun Systems Tour in Jakarta, Indonesia on November 5, then MyGOSSCON 2008 on November 6.
For the Sun event, there’s a corporate slide deck - MySQL from Sun: The Platform for the Web Economy. For the MyGOSSCON event I’ll be speaking about MySQL Best Practices.
If you’re in Jakarta and free on November 5, don’t hesitate to say hi. Similar invite for MyGOSSCON, though I don’t actually know if its open to all.
I think Giuseppe (the man with too many blogs!) was a little too optimistic in his last post… the MySQL Conference Call for Participation has received an amazing amount of proposals, but not enough by our standards.
I personally believe there should be a 1:3 accepted-rejected ratio. Currently, its not there yet. Why do I like such high ratios? It means that there are actually so many good talks, and we (the voting committee) pick the best of the best, to give attendees the most mileage for their time and money. Or am I too harsh?
Anyway, the word on the street is that we will extend the Call for Participation, mostly because it is the right thing to do, and lots of people expect it. Expect an official announcement to go out soon about this. But remember, you’d be loved more if you submitted before midnight (PDT) on October 22.
Within the APAC region? Planning to attend foss.my (November 8-9 2008)? Why not stay a little longer, for the MySQL for Developers training course - 5 days, from 10-14 November 2008, conducted by my good friends at hSenid (MySQL partners in Malaysia). To register, or find out more, drop Ruchith a quick email at ruchith[at]hsenid[dot]com.
This is a picture with a lot of impact. This was from Seedcamp. The question asked was “What tools will you use?”.
Mårten pointed this out to us at the opening speeches at the Sun Database Group Developer’s Meeting. Its interesting to see what technologies are used. MySQL is by far, the most popular database server that all startups seem to use (though to be fair, I see CouchDB and PostgreSQL there too). PHP is about the most popular language (followed closely by Java, then Ruby). Its amazing to see what kind of technologies people are using to build the companies of tomorrow.
Find out more about it, at the Zeitgeist redux on the seedcamp blog.
I had first seen the interesting Rails logo in a talk by Terry Chay, while I was at OSCON, a few months ago.
Now, my esteemed colleague Jay Pipes has it on his laptop. It seems they’re making stickers, even.
Otherwise, my next task is to revamp our Ruby content. Currently, it looks a little sad. It has to at least be as good as Using MySQL With Ruby, no?
So, you want to compile Workbench for Linux, on Fedora 9. You need to install the following packages:
autoconf automake libtool libzip-devel libxml2-devel libsigc++20-devel libglade2-devel gtkmm24-devel mesa-libGLU-devel mysql-libs mysql mysql-devel uuid-devel lua-devel glitz-devel glitz-glx-devel pixman-devel pcre-devel libgnome-devel gtk+-devel pango-devel cairo
I feel I’m being too liberal with dependencies, but I’m not about to strip it, I just want to get it working first :)
You need to have ctemplate and ctemplate-devel installed from updates-testing-newkey (relevant koji build log).
By default, configure.in in Workbench looks for “google-ctemplate”, as opposed to just “ctemplate” as Fedora calls it. You can fix this (easy), or “cheat” - in /usr/local/include you can do sudo ln -s /usr/include/ctemplate google. Take your pick.
Now for the fun. Fedora includes gcc-4.3. Ubuntu ships gcc-4.2. Let’s just say gcc-4.3 got stricter (its C++ header dependency streamlining related). So strict, they have a useful porting to gcc-4.3 guide. Just FYI, I believe OpenSUSE is also shipping a more modern GCC (I expect the next Ubuntu release in the coming month to do the same).
So, start getting used to doing the following in files that lead the compiler to fail:
This will help get rid of error messages like: error: ‘memset’ was not declared in this scope. This stuff is already fixed in trunk (or the patch is being applied).
You will need to pick up cairo from source. Why? Because –enable-glitz isn’t on by default in the RPM spec file (similar with Ubuntu). The glitz backend is apparently still a release preview and doesn’t fully work yet. (I have spoken to Alfredo, and he says he’s just removed the requirement on glitz in trunk).
Now, once you’ve built cairo with glitz, before running ./autogen.sh, do: export PKGCONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig. Then go ahead and make it.
There are still plenty of warnings that spew by. I have this vague idea that once Workbench for Linux sits on Launchpad, we’ll run a janitorial tree that fixes warnings in the code. A great way to garner community contributions!
Anyway, a lot of this is either fixed or patches will be applied to trunk. I expect a mysql-workbench-5.1.2-alpha out sooner than you think to eclipse 5.1.1-alpha. Again, superb work Alfredo (and MikeZ and the rest of the GUI team).
I had the pleasure of sitting right across the MySQL GUI Tools Team, and decided to try my hand at Workbench (Workbench for Linux, that is). Congratulations to the entire team for the great work! I am excited.
First up, the things you need on Ubuntu 8.04 (I created a fresh install, and installed all the updates), if you’re downloading the binary:
It works. It starts up. Its exciting. Of course, when I try to edit a table name or even create a table, it fails by segmentation fault. Segfaults are annoying… so the best way to debug it, is of course to run catchsegv. After running catchsegv ./mysql-workbench 2>&1 >crashlog, I sent it over to Alfredo for him to debug.
Of course, as luck would have it, the build ships stripped binaries, so the segfaults can’t be debugged. Grr. Nevermind, I decided its time to build it (warm thanks to the Workbench team for staying around till like 7.30pm at the meeting room). As a consequence, Alfredo managed to also update the Linux Build Instructions page as we had learned some things along the way.
I built glitz, pixman and cairo from freedekstop.org (when building cairo, remember to do it as such: ./configure –enable-glitz), but from what I gather, this is now available via Ubuntu 8.04 and is sufficient. So the build dependencies are all in Ubuntu, which is useful (in terms of building a shippable DEB). The only thing that isn’t available in a packaged form is Google’s ctemplate library. I notice the instructions now don’t mention installing a few more packages I installed on Ubuntu (I’m not even sure now if they’re a hard dependency or not, I’ll check later). But if something fails, install libproc-dev libXtst-dev libdnet libdnet-dev.
Like magic, I can now edit and create tables, draw them even. No crashes, its pretty stable for an alpha release (provided you’re using a version you build!). I expect a healthy continuos release cycle, so if you encounter a bug today, it might be fixed before you know it… Of course, this doesn’t discount you from being good friends with our bugs system at http://bugs.mysql.com/.
My short term plan to assist Workbench on Linux:
Oh, if you have issues, hop on to IRC on freenode, and join #workbench. Sure, there won’t be great answers in the next week or so (while we’re all busy at the developers meeting), but usually there’s always someone awake on that channel.
Its no secret that all the MySQL Sun Database Group developers are here in Riga, Latvia for the developer’s meeting. I have my video camera on hand, and plan to conduct bite-sized interviews.
But that’s not why I’m writing this. This is for you. Since you can’t be here, is there something you’d like to ask a MySQL developer with regards to a bug you filed? A new feature request? A worklog item?
Write a comment, or drop me email at colin[at]mysql[dot]com. Be quick though, as the Q&A sessions I imagine, will be fairly impromptu.