Open Query develops its own training materials, rigorously kept up to date, and thus always printed "on demand", i.e. just before an actual training course takes place. They're neatly bound with colour cover and green back board, just looks nice and clean. They also have a special layout that makes note-taking easier.

I'm teaching a custom MySQL training day tomorrow, so I had the stuff ready last week and took it to a friendly local shop for the usual treatment. All seemed perfect. I happened to be out of town on Saturday, so I was just going to pick things up today (Monday). Easy enough, I know the local shop and trust them now to always do a good job and deliver whatever they promise.

Except... today is a public holiday in Queensland: Labour Day. Many years ago I worked for an employer (no longer in business) in the Netherlands who reckoned that labour day was really …

If you've passed your CMA, CMDBA, CMDEV or the Cluster certification, be sure to signup for the MySQL Certified Professionals LinkedIn group. This group is for certified MySQL professionals, recruiters, human resource managers and other technical hiring managers.

This group is not affiliated with Sun or MySQL AB in any way.MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

If you've passed your CMA, CMDBA, CMDEV or the Cluster certification, be sure to signup for the MySQL Certified Professionals LinkedIn group. This group is for certified MySQL professionals, recruiters, human resource managers and other technical hiring managers.

This group is not affiliated with Sun or MySQL AB in any way.MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

Just two weeks after having returned from the MySQL Conference, I just arrived safely in San Francisco again. This time to attend the CommunityOne on Monday and the JavaOne conference from Tuesday till Friday, which should keep me occupied for the rest of the week. I look forward to meeting my fellow MySQL team members (Colin, Giuseppe and Jay will be here, too), as well as many new colleagues from Sun! Shoot me an email, if you would like to meet.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced two new offerings that will significantly expand customer choice by providing users with access to Sun's innovative open source software running on the Amazon Web Services platform. Sun has added premium technical support for its MySQL™ database running on Linux and on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to its global support and services offerings.

Just two observations as I was browsing along today... see https://glassfish.dev.java.net/ (the GlassFish site).

What is GlassFish, you may ask? Well you may indeed ask that, it's not unreasonable to do so ;-), but the site (or at least the front page) won't tell you. This is just a funny observation that actually holds true for many if not most geek-focused software products. A site will rave on about the latest version and news, but nowhere will you see described what it actually is. CLEARLY, if you are looking at the site, you already know, right? WRONG ;-)

Then, and this is just seriously funny IMHO, look at the pool of logos on the right, all except the NetBeans one are in these shades of orange and blue. Most of them come from Sun/Java, and there's of course the MySQL logo. They really do neatly blend together. What a charming coincidence! (the current …

MySQL 6.x Roadmap in Development
By Peter Gulutzan

MySQL’s marketing folks know what goes on, but they emphasize the marketable. I’ll re-spin what they say about MySQL Version 6 and 7, emphasizing what we’re developing now.

The slide show from the April 2008 User Conference lists the coming features thus:
”
[ MySQL 6.0 ]
Falcon Engine (Transactional engine)
New Backup (version 1.0) (Cross engine, non blocking)
Online add column (Cluster only)
Replication conflict detection (Cluster only)
Optimizer enhancements (Faster subqueries)
Better performance info (Diagnostics and more)
Alpha available now (with Falcon beta)
GA scheduled for Q4/2008
[ MySQL 6.x ]
Foreign keys (all storage engines)
Better prepared statements (prepare any SQL statement)
Better server-side cursors (Faster/less memory)
Replication …

We announced the results of our third fiscal quarter (Q3) on Thursday last week, and the results weren't what I, or any of us, wanted.

As you can read in the press release, we delivered $3.267 billion in revenue for Q3, roughly flat with a year ago. On that revenue, we delivered a GAAP loss of 4 cents (equal to the charge associated with the acquisition of MySQL, which closed within the quarter) - on that revenue, we generated around $320m in cash.

The low light of the quarter was revenue in the US - which declined year over year by nearly 10%, a big step down for a geography that typically contributes 40% of our total revenue. The highlight of the quarter was our India performance, up 30% year over year - and our chip multi-threading Niagara systems, which grew (billings) 110%.

We had growth in 12 of 16 geographies …

Saturday was the Dallas Tech Fest. Several hundred developers heard presentations on the latest and greatest from several vendors and speakers. Sun was was on the sponsors and I spent a few hours meeting and greeting.

Several people were interested in MySQL but had no idea where to start. MySQL's download page really needs a 'hey, first timers who want to learn MySQL, click here to get the server and GUI tools in one fell swoop'.

As one of the shrinking numbers of CLI-centric dinosaurs, I acknowledge that most of the world prefers point-and-click and the MySQL Administrator makes quick work of many statements that require fussy typing. The Query Browser is also one of those tools that quickly becomes a regular in your arsenal. Add in the Workbench and you have a pretty complete set of tools for designing, administrating, and using your databases.

Then you need a good book on MySQL. I will try to do a …

VirtualBox 1.6 is out. Note that now you can use Mac OS X and Solaris as a host platform. Naturally, having Mac OS X support excites me.

I tried installing a Ubuntu 8.04 server guest. Found a tiny issue - 64-bit guests aren’t supported yet :( So I pulled in the 32-bit ISO, and that installed just fine. Note that PAE support for guests exist now, and this is a good step in the right direction.

Sun’s building an OpenxVM community, which currently focus on xVM and xVM VirtualBox. It also harnesses technologies like Open Service Tag. All in all, I think a lot of MySQL users should be interested in virtualization, as there is a growing amount of hardware out there with many, many cores available for use.