How dramatic a topic. Anyways, I just send of an email to the PDO list, where I CC'ed a long list of developers from the community and RDBMS vendors. I hope that this will become the starting point for work on a PDO version 1.1. This will hopefully will just be the first step towards even bigger things to come, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. I really think that today we have more developers and vendors interested than ever. Now we just need to figure out how to work together within the PHP development and legal model. But recent discussions, especially with various vendors, have made me more hopeful than ever that we have a chance to make it happen. Please join the discussion if you are interested.

I keep seeing this posts by some of the manager types on planet MySQL about how they or some other guy is worrying about open source vendors not raking in billions or are not stealing billions of money out of peoples pockets that should not be playing on the stock market and things along those lines. While I do agree that its great to see open source software flourish .. actually let me clear that up, why do I even care if open source software flourishes? I care because I think open source software enables a different kind of growth for society, one that is shared, one that lowers barriers, one that I feel is more in tune with a world at peace.

This includes the end of support for all things PHP 4 as noted by seemingly everybody on php planet. But I also wanted to reminds people that the same is more or less happening in the MySQL world too. Did you know that active support for MySQL 4.x ended along with the year 2006? Did you even know that MySQL 5.0 active support is ending this year!?! Given MySQL 5.1 no show mentality, they might have to review this. Well there is of course extended support that extends MySQL 4.0 support until this year, MySQL 4.1 until the end of next year and MySQl 5.0 until the end of 2011.

I have my first SQL Server project lined up. So I am just interested in hearing some stories from the trenches form people that have been there already. How does PHP and SQL Server 2005 work out together? How do they work out together with *nix or Linux specifically? How do they work together with a Mac (since all the developers on the projects use Macs)? What are the limitations?

I am very glad to hear that Brian's vision for Drizzle seems to be quite pluggable. This hits home perfectly with my hopes .. well for Drizzle to be pluggable! While I have not had the time to install and play with Drizzle I did stumble over the list of what has been dropped from MySQL so far. I am not sure how complete this list is (for example VIEW's are not listed as having been removed, but it was said that they would be removed), but I assume that nothing on the list is on there falsely. So some brief observations: