Date: 2008-05-02 12:47 Subject: Joel on Architecture Austronauts Security: Public

Joel Spolsky has another great rant, this time about what he calls Architecture Astronauts.

The hallmark of an "architecture astronaut" is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. [...]

[...] one sure tip-off to the fact that you're being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!

The web 2.0 and Open Source business world still has some of that, and not only with synchronisation (which served as Joel's key example). And apart from producing stuff people don't really want/need, many companies operating in this sphere simply do not seem to grasp, is that announcing something is not at all interesting. A press release does not make me want to take a look at your product!

Their delusion of the importance of their foo is induced by the fact that they've been working on it for way too long (time to market is key, really), so of course it's exciting to them! But that's not the real world. I believe this actually relates to both the product itself, as well as the announcements for it.

Yes, I know that press releases are aimed at the media journos (that's journalist in good Autralian) and not at the general public, however the general public does get to see it on front pages, rss feeds, and so no. And do the journos want to see this stuff? Probably not.

I am also fully aware that there are different sets of users, and someone hacking in their attic is not the same as a big corporation (although these days the big corp could be based in the attic! ;-). But I do think that fundamentally, times have changed, and neither of the aforementioned target audiences actually cares squat about most announcements, new fancy products, and so on.

What is cool is, as usual, someone else raving about something.

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Date: 2008-05-02 13:06 Subject: phpMyAdmin vs MySQL Workbench Security: Public

What an odd comparison, you might think! I'd have thought so too, but let's explore this for a minute...

Last month, Akash Metha did an excellent review of GUI tools at the Brisbane MySQL Group meeting.
Among the numerous OS specific apps (Windows, Mac, Linux) some are cross platform, but the most prolific ones appear to be Windows specific, like HeidiSQL and Webyog.
And as it turns out, everybody uses phpMyAdmin at least sometimes. Other web-based tools include snazzy Flash or Ajax/JavaScript magic, but while they look nice, the attendees reckon it's just a tad indulgent and more simple stuff like phpMyAdmin is generally preferred - In 2007 phpMyAdmin won the SourceForge.net Community Choice Award for "Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins".

What was nice in the GUI overview though, was a little Ajax app offering visual schema design. And I thought "hey that's cool, I'll talk to the phpMyAdmin guys at the MySQL Conf and see if they could integrate something like that". So I did. I talked with Marc Delisle... and he took me over to their booth in the DotOrg pavilion, and simply demonstrated a component that had been in phpMyAdmin for a few years already! It only deals with foreign key constraints, but I reckon that's really all you want anyway - it's fine to use the regular table structure editor for other stuff.

It's called "Relation View" and available through a link when in the table Structure tab.

So there you have it. Visual schema design/viewing. For free, platform independent, and what have you. The phpMyAdmin are a low-key gang, and this component is only enabled if the necessary underlying support tables are present, and (if I remember correctly) some php extension(s). So many people may have never encountered it on their own installation. But it's all there! So this is my little marketing pitch for that great effort. Thanks Marc & all other people who work on phpMyAdmin. A great tool indeed!

(if anyone has a screenshot handy for me, I'd be happy to plug it in!)

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