So, I’m a little late to the game reporting this. Key folks from MySQL (my former company) invaded Sun Microsystems (my new overlords and masters ) yesterday with hundreds of Dolphins as part of an April Fools stunt to say hi to all our new co-workers at Sun in Menlo Park. Zack Urlocker and Marten Mickos appear in this very geeky video now available on YouTube. Yes I work with and for a very geeky group of people

To see the fishy results and the porpoises in question, check out the rest of the photos that Zack also put up.

With the advent of fast and reasonably sized SSD drives, I have to admit that even I, as one who still thinks the standard hard-drive tends to be a better choice, am warming up to solid-state. One crazy benchmark I have always wanted to do is how using consumer flash cards (SecureDigital, CompactFlash, etc.) stack up to their dedicated drive brethren. I just noticed that you can now buy off-brand 4GB High-Speed SD cards for around $10. That is amazingly impressive when you consider, even a few months ago, how much 4GB cards cost. After doing a bit of math, the economics work out pretty well. To match a 64GB SSD drive in capacity, I need 16 4GB SD cards. At $10 a piece, that's only $160. That's a pretty cheap way to match the capacity of an SSD drive without the cost.

Of course, there's a huge catch, or everyone would likely already be doing this. Actually there are quite a few. The numbers I ran don't include the cost of USB card …

A gentle reminder: next week, there will be two more stops of the MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour:

• Monday, April 7th, 19:00: Hamburg, Germany. We will meet in the meeting rooms of the local Sun Microsystems offices ( Nagelsweg 55, 22097 Hamburg). There will be two technical sessions: Giuseppe will talk about the MySQL Sandbox, Kay Koll will give a presentation about how to combine MySQL with OpenOffice.org. He will also describe the new report generator and give an overview over the future of OpenOffice. You can register for this event via meetup.com or …

If you've been following his blog, then you will already know that Ronald Bradford has joined PrimeBase Technologies. We are very pleased to have him on board! As many know, Ronald has always been very active in the MySQL community as far as his job has made this possible.

Ironically during his time at MySQL he was less present in the community than before. When we discussed our plans for PrimeBase with him, Ronald was interested because it was an opportunity to return to a more active role in the community. I am very glad that this motivation was understood by almost everyone at MySQL and we are all looking forward to seeing and hearing more from Ronald.

But, of course, Ronald is not "just a pretty face" ;) He will be helping us to design and specify our open source products (including …

Read more about the April Fool pranks played at Sun over past years.

Technorati: aprilfool mysql jonathan sun

Today I started my new job at PrimeBase Technologies. The company that has brought you the PBXT and Blob Streaming Pluggable Storage Engines for MySQL 5.1.

My move to Germany has gone mostly without incident and now I’m settling in to different weather, language and food, plus the change in time zones +6 hours.

A smaller company from my previous, but I’m part of a larger group then expected. One of 26 people in the office. It’s good to have a desk, a big monitor (and definitely not a German keyboard) and see and talk to people on various topics and interests in comparison to either past work at home by myself, or on a new customer site each week during my consulting days.

Preparations for the upcoming …

MySQL Proxy allows you to execute multiple queries, by inserting them into the query queue.
What happens if one of the queries in the pipeline generates an error?
If you don't handle this occurrence, the Proxy will continue sending to the server all the queries in the pipeline, regardless of the result. It's easy to understand that, if the second query depends on the execution of the first one, checking the result of each query is essential.
We know already how to return an error. We only need to apply that knowledge in the right place.
The read_query_result() from the previous …

Contrary to my earlier April Fool’s Stuck - No country to call home I’m alive and well in Hamburg Germany with my new job at PrimeBase Technologies.

Thanks for those concerned MySQL souls that fell pray to my “Evil Genius” as Farhan called it.

Looking forward to seeing people at the MySQL User Conference in Santa Clara in two weeks.

There was a Joomla! CMS user group meeting in Brisbane yesterday (yes on April 1st but no joke), which featured Joomla!'s main man Andrew Eddie, another core developer Sam Moffatt. It was a good meeting (food & drink was provided, which always helps too). Installation of Joomla! is a breeze, and I'm told that it's now powering 2% of sites around the world now.

A lot of skilled web developers use it, but that's not the reason for the high uptake. It appears that "ordinary users" with little or no web experience are able to install and use Joomla! effectively to set up their little websites, and that is quite an accomplishment. In that context, it's perhaps similar to PHP in the web scripting sphere, and MySQL in the database realm (although one might say that SQLite is even easier in specific contexts).

There was also a brief demo of …

So that's what happened after the "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish".... congrats to Steve Curry (honorary Australian!), Zack Urlocker, Marten Mickos and the rest of the gang who pulled this stunt at Sun HQ. I think it was good clean fun. Check out the video, too. I hear that Sun employees took good care of the 500 dolphins, leaving nothing to clean up.

Looking at the photos on PicassaWeb, I wonder about one thing... browse here: http://picasaweb.google.com/ZUrlocker/DolphinStunt/photo#5184192254851634418 [sorry I can't make the photo show …