Please note that Oracle Univerisity has placed a hard limit on number of exams at the Users Conference this year. If you wait to the last moment, you may not get a chance to show your knowledge!

Congratulations to those who took certification exams at the MySQL Users Conference this year. We have 18 new 5.0 DBAs and 2 new 5.0 Developers after Monday.

Testing is in the Magnolia Room in the Hyatt, near the front desk and starts at 8:30 AM PDT.

Here are the slides to my talk yesterday: A Practical Guide to the PBXT Storage Engine.

For anyone who missed my talk, I think it is worth going through the slides, because the are fairly self explanatory.

If there are any questions, please post them as a comment to the blog. I will be glad to answer :)

Just a quick note to say the talk I gave today at the MySQL User's Conference - The Thinking Person's Guide to Data Warehouse Design - is now available for viewing and download on Slideshare.

Update: Sheeri was kind enough to have this session recorded and posted the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_iaJ8TFwy8.

Day 2 of the MySQL Conference I found to be quite good. Things were kicked off with a keynote by Oracle then followed by Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly press - yes, that O'Reilly) which I enjoyed quite a bit. I basically equated O'Reilly to Sarah Conner and Skynet being the companies offering complete stack solutions. Google is one such name and, at least the impression I got from O'Reilly, was that, even if Google is a good company, any company that has control over everything is a bad thing. And I tend to agree. Choice, after all, is a great thing. He had quite a bit more to say but that was the thing that stuck most with me.

I also was honored to receive an award from Rackspace's behalf for our commitment to Drizzle. To be fair, this is really something that came from our Cloud division so perhaps someone from Cloud may have …

While sitting around with Stewart, Eric, Max and Beer at the MySQL Conference and Expo, Stewart thought it would be funny if someone would do a graph showing the trend of Google searches comparing NoSQL and Your Mom. Always wanting to make Stewart laugh, I ran over to Google Trends to see if it could make a graph.

NoSQL vs. Your Mom

Given all the hype these days, you might think that Your Mom would stand no chance against the Juggernaut of NoSQL. But I was quite surprised to see that Your Mom really stuck it to NoSQL. Giving NoSQL some credit, it is making some progress.

…

While working on a transformation I ran into a problem with comparing two (seemingly) identical numbers using the Filter Rows step. I had a case where a transformation selected two DECIMAL(13,5) values from the database and compared them.

I could see that the numbers were identical in the MySQL database, but the Filter Rows step returned false when comparing. To troubleshoot, I tried multiplying the difference of the two numbers by 10,000,000 ( in the transform) and I actually discovered a very small difference beyond the 5th decimal place. This datatype in MySQL is considered an "exact" datatype, not to be confused with a FLOAT.

My solution is to convert the two fields to Strings and do the comparison. If you don't like that, then explicitly round the numbers using the Calculator step. The Select and Alter step, doesn't seem to truncate the numbers and I don't think it was intended to alter the raw data anyway.
…

I checked in in the speaker lounge and picked up my bag of shwag. This year O'Reilly is giving speakers some free books, slide:ology and Confessions of a Public Speaker . It makes sense for them to give these books to their speakers, as the better the speakers are, the better the conference is, and the more successful O'Reilly is at getting more conference business.

I spent the first part of the day fielding scheduled calls with members of the tech press about Gear6's …

From the MySQL keynote today by Edward Screven. The Oracle LAMP Stack is looking pretty impressive. The stack includes: - Oracle Enterprise Linux - Oracle VM (Xen-based) - Apache, Glassfish - MySQL - Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby, C, C++ More … Continue reading →

Yes, no kidding, I'll be wearing an old Oracle T-Shirt from my days at Big-O in the 1980's. I was, and your Oracle dudes who has been around for a while might remember these, an Oracle Unix Wizard. Actually I was a Wizard II (I went to the second training), but the T-Shirt I will be wearing is from Oracle Unix Wizards I.

Where will this take place you ask, as you just HAVE to come? Well, no further than my BoF tonite on the History on Databases. And I can tell you, this is not a T-Shirt that I would normally wear in public, but there is a lot of stuff I would do to attract a crowd to a BoF (just to see everyone running away in disgust). So at 7:00 PM tonite, tuesday, in Ballroom C (unless the location changes). Bring your good mood, ideas on the past and on the future, and above all, your barf-bags, to see what an ""Oracle Unix Wizard" looked …

PACKT Publishing sent me titled "MySQL Admin Cookbook" to review and I told them that I would be brutally honest about it. They said cool and well here, we go.

Overall, the book is cool if you are starting out in MySQL administration and want to get a box up and running. If you are looking to scale MySQL or make your application faster this is not the book for you. If you are worried about consistency and getting the most out of your hardware-this is not the book for you. If you are trying to figure out what the best index combination is-again-this is not the book for you. If you want to know how to add users, or set up replication, or dump a CSV format text file of data then this is the book for …