My passion for Open Source

I am a very strong proponent of Open Source (excluding my Macbook). Joining MySQL Inc was a wonderful achievement, being part of the team behind the most popular open source database. Leaving MySQL was not an easy decision due to the people, but the Sun transition and requirements did help. However it is no surprise I am joining another open source company – Primebase Technologies in Hamburg, Germany. My association with the MySQL Community will only be strengthened with my full work and support behind the PBXT and Blob Streaming pluggable storage engines for MySQL.

It is actually poetic that I am joing Primebase for I have the auspicious recognition while an active part of the MySQL community of introducing Paul McCullagh to MySQL some 2 years ago. Only weeks later, PBXT was MySQL news in the opening CEO keynote my Marten Mickos at the 2006 MySQL Users Conference .

I expect this opportunity will increase my contributions, in particular in the lacking areas of instrumentation and memory management. As well I will now be focusing my efforts on MySQL 5.1 and ensuring this is of the highest quality for the MySQL Community. While my open source code contributions have been small to date, my first some years ago adding in JMeter support for MySQL Stored procedures and Transactions, the feeling of seeding instead of leaching is a wonderful thing. I look forward to a greater opportunity with the team at Primebase Technologies.

Tagged with: Databases MySQL PBXT PrimeBase Technologies

Producing Skewness statistics with SQL

Skewness measures the asymmetry of a distribution. A perfectly symmetric distribution has a skewness of zero. A positive skew (right-skewed) means the tail extends to the right — a small number of high values pull the mean above the median.

Exploring the vsql-ai extension

The vsql-ai extension adds AI prompt capabilities and text embeddings directly in SQL queries, with support for Anthropic Claude , Google Gemini , OpenAI ChatGPT , or a local LLM such as Ollama .

Producing Chi-Squared statistics with SQL

The Chi-Squared test is one of the most widely used statistical tests for categorical data. It comes in two flavors: the goodness-of-fit test asks whether an observed frequency distribution matches an expected one, while the test of independence asks whether two categorical variables are associated with each other.