(Or the perils of working at home too much)

I was out of town for Marten's going away party so I decide to put together a brief video recalling what it was like to work with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL for the last 5+ years.  Inspired by Joaquin Phoenix, or perhaps it was the Unambomber, it came out a bit weird.  But what the heck.

Marten, it just won't be the same without you.  Thank you for your leadership and the confidence you bestowed in those who worked for you.  Confidence enough to pay …

I encountered the following text in a man page. Please tell me that I am not alone in thinking that the "typical" solution suggested is WTF worthy...

After calling "commit" or "rollback" many drivers will not let you
fetch from a previously active "SELECT" statement handle that's a child
of the same database handle. A typical way round this is to connect the
the database twice and use one connection for "SELECT" statements.

If the programmer really wants to reuse values from a SELECT statement which occurred within a transaction after the transaction is closed, they should cache those values themselves by populating some variable within their application. IMO, they definitely should not be using multiple connections to the same database from one unit of work unless they are perfectly happy to accept inconsistent data and potentially corrupted inserts and updates.

No wonder …

My good friend and open source-loving, running, beer-drinking community ambassador and MySQL VP Kaj Arnö (top row middle) has named me (bottom left) in the "7 useless facts" meme.  I don't mind.  I'd mentally prepared myself for this semi-fun semi-useless task when I saw Jay Pipes do this a few weeks ago.  I figured Kaj would fall soon and he would spread the virus, er fun, to me. 

Here are the rules:

• Link your …

Today marks the one year anniversary of Sun acquiring MySQL, which had the codename "Heineken."  So we had a little reception over at our offices at Sun's Menlo Park campus.  We also opened up a beer called "Sandels" which was the codename for our IPO project.

No doubt there will be more drinking this evening.

Here are a few key posts from my various blogs from the last year.

From my InfoWorld open sources blog:

• Open Source Trends for 2009
• John Kotter on Urgency
• MySQL 5.1 Released
• Gartner Reports 50% Growth in use of Open Source DBMS
• …

Andrii Nikitin, one of the MySQL support engineers located in Ukraine, has asked for help from MySQLers and so I'm sharing this information to the community at large.  Andrii's son Ivan, who is 2 1/2, is in need of a bone marrow transplant operation.  This will require going to a clinic in Europe that will not be covered by regular insurance.  So Andrii has aksed to see if we could help raise funds.  The cost is expected to be $150,000 - $250,000.  A huge amount for an engineer from Ukraine to cover.   But a small amount by many people could make a big difference. 

Many MySQLers have kicked in to …

My blog been added several days ago to the Planet MySQL feed, and am now one step closer to world domination.

I'll assume that most people who see this entry at their feed readers would be unfamiliar with this blog, so I should be including an introduction here. Instead, I invite you to take a look at the home page and look at some olds posts of mine that might interest you. Not everything is about MySQL, and the Planet MySQL feed takes only the ones that I've labeled as such.

The following posts are the top search engine keywords that this blog gets, so you might want to start there:

• MySQL T-SQL CASE Statement: Bad Language Design
• …

I've used Safari (the O'Reilly version) for a number of years now and it is a resource I often recommend to coworkers. Basically, it's an on-line library of technical books (since expanded to include video) from a group of publishers. O'Reilly, Microsoft Press, Cisco Press, Syngress, and many others have books and resources on-line at Safari. It came into being in 2001 but I remember a predecessor version back in the late 90s from Que Publishing/Macmillan Computer Publishing called Personal Bookshelf, which I also used. Back in those days I was in the Air Force and that provided some of the technical books I couldn't afford on an Air Force salary.

Subscribing to Safari gives one the ability to put a certain number of books onto a "bookshelf" and the books …

I have been on vacation the last week, which meant I spent the previous three weeks at work preparing to go on that vacation. :) All in all, it was much needed. It represented the first family vacation we've taken since I was still in the Air Force (and I separated in 1999). We've taken a couple of days here or there or I've taken a week off to take care of personal things, but we finally did the week long, get away from everything vacation.

Our vacation was fairly inexpensive. We spent a week at Myrtle Beach, SC, at my mother-in-law's house. I admit this is a great convenience because Myrtle Beach is certainly a vacation location and not having to splurge on hotel and being able to minimize other expenses like food was great. But I think the most important thing was the time away and the time to destress. Given that, just about anywhere with some reasonable accomodations and some things to do (and even small towns nearby always have …

In two blogs I follow, Andy Leonard's blog on SQLBlogs.com and Sheeri Kritzer's The MySQL She-BA, the question of what is a database administrator has come back up. Andy has posted twice on the topic, first with how DBAs are an enterprise requirement and then a follow-up to that post. In Sheeri's case, she was pointing out that a system administrator friend of hers considers the use of phpMyAdmin as a determining factor on whether or not one is DBA: he's not much of a DBA …