Pink Sheets

Bruce Dembecki, who apparently is a very hands-on Vice President who works with clients on IT stuff (ok, so this is still a very small company), seems to be having trouble last Thursday on the mailing.database.myodbc newsgroup:

So I am attempting a 5.0 upgrade from 4.1 on one of our OS X servers...

When attempting to launch mysqld it quits, with this error (showing
two from the log files, happens with our build or the MySQL binary):

050617 14:03:46 mysqld started
/usr/local/mysql-standard-5.0.7-beta-osx10.3-powerpc/bin/mysqld_safe:
line 2: --datadir=/mysqldata2: No such file or directory
050617 14:03:46 mysqld ended

050617 14:07:58 mysqld started
/usr/local/mysql-lw64bit-5.0.7-apple-darwin8.1-powerpc/bin/
mysqld_safe64: line 2: --datadir=/mysqldata2: No such file or directory
050617 14:07:58 mysqld ended

Needless to say /mysqldata2 is present and accounted for, and has the
correct permissions for mysql to be able to read/write data... It is
a symlink to another volume, but if I substitute the true path to the
volume, I get the same error...

I had problems with one version of 4.1 having problems figuring out
where to write the log files and it turned out to be an absolute file
name issue... eg it treated /logs/binlogs as being relative to the
data directory, and not an absolute directory... I resolved that by
changing the log file setting to read ../logs/binlogs and it worked
fine. Assuming there was a similar problem here I have tried various
levels of ../../mysqldata2 to make sure I am escaping from whatever
directory it is starting me in, and have failed to get there, after
switching up 7 levels, far more than would be needed to get back to
root from anywhere in /usr/local/mysql-any-version

Any idea how I can get MySQL 5.0 to launch here would be greatly
appreciated :-)

Best Regards, Bruce

He's had a lot of messages on Usenet newsgroups about this sort of stuff: sometimes answering questions, sometimes asking them. And sometimes he endorses stuff in press releases:

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 7, 2005--MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today announced a new pair of visual database tools for the Macintosh OS X platform. Designed to make life easier for MySQL(R) database developers, DBAs and users -- new beta versions of the MySQL Query Browser and MySQL Administrator tools for Mac OS X are freely available from the company's Web site under the GPL open source license at http://dev.mysql.com.

MySQL and the new Macintosh tools will be demonstrated this week at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference being held in San Francisco.

"The Apple Macintosh is one of the most popular platforms for MySQL development," said Maurizio Gianola, vice president of Software Engineering for MySQL AB. "We are happy to give database developers more choice by offering these open source database query and administration tools for Mac OS X."

"MySQL has proven to be fast and reliable on our heavy-load Apple Xserve servers -- it is every bit as easy to set up and manage as even the most diehard Mac user would expect," said Bruce Dembecki, Vice President, Solutions Development for LiveWorld, Inc., the leading full-service online community agency with clients such as eBay, AOL Time Warner, and Expedia. "We get an extremely high number of page views every day on our clients' discussion boards, and the combination of MySQL and Macintosh has scaled-out very well for us."

...and speaking at technical conferences. Very consistent. That's a good thing.

I noticed this: "Bruce spent several years building distribution companies in the Australian IT industry, including Keyway, Allaw Technologies, and his own company, Axon Technology."

And this:

How to reach the Talk of the Town...

We appreciate and welcome your feedback to this newsletter. The editor welcomes suggestions, constructive criticism, flowers, and chocolates at any time! Please send all submissions to:

TalkCityNews@axon.net

In the prospectus, there's a very brief mention of this relationship. I've got to go back and look at it.