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 …

My wife wants to learn database design. She is an archaeologist. She wants to read a book written in plain English, not h4×0r jargon. She is smart and capable and knows her own data, but does not know SQL or database theory. She wants to be able to design databases and be understood by others who know database design. She also wants to be able to explain her ideas to a programmer who will build the systems she’s designing. Is there a book for her?

Books, Database Design

While I’ve known how floating points are stored, I didn’t know if decimal was stored any differently, or if it was more or less accurate. According to a post on the MySQL list:

Bruno Rodrigues Silva wrote:
> Dear all.
>
> The MySQL Manual inform that Decimal Data Type is used
> for represent exact-number, but like Float Point Data
> Type, Decimal use rounding case the fractional part is
> not sufficient. Therefore, what the difference?

Hi Bruno,

FLOAT rounds as floating point and DECIMAL rounds as you would expect it
to. Floating point arithmetic is not exact and that’s why they’ve called
DECIMAL an “exact packed decimal number” because apparently you can rely
on it’s roundings.

The primary use for DECIMAL is money, where floating point would fail
…

I will take MySQL certification exams, therefore I am going through MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide. It is a pretty cool book in that it goes to the point right away without many wasted words. Too many technical books dance around the topic, fill the volume with screen shots, but do not deliver the goods in the end. I am reading the Safari online version. With so many pages, I can see the physical book can be bulky.

Anyway, some comments and observations:

1. Sybase, MySQL, and Sql Server’s definition and implementation of database and schema are somewhat close. I dislike Microsoft’s definition and usage of schema, especially in Sql Server 2005. It is very confusing to new or DBAs from other platforms.

Sybase, MySQL, and Sql Server all support the USE …

More user group meetings in the coming days.
The meetup/mashup tour are events where the Sun and MySQL communities will meet, merge, discuss technology, socialize, and drink together.
On April 2nd the meetup is in a pub in Paris, where I expect that the drinking will overcome the technology, but I will let you know if things turn out different.
Milan will follow on April 3rd, in a more conservative venue (Sun conference hall), but the drinking doesn't have to be underestimated.
Hamburg on April 7th and Berlin on 8th will be definitely technical. The technical drink will start after the geeky stuff.

As you know, Sun's open source software and microprocessor strategy has been, at times controversial. We've filled trade journals and chat rooms with all kinds of dialog and the occasional crackpot conspiracy theory.

As many have rightly assumed from the outset, that controversy was, in fact, not a byproduct of the strategy - it was the strategy: if you're talking about Sun, you're not talking about the other guy. And then you'll buy a datacenter.

But now that we've firmly established our reputation for open source leadership, I'm very worried there's no more controversy to be had. There's too much trust in the system, and too much clarity around our strategic intent. So it's getting tougher and tougher to kick up a storm - and we can't very well spend a billion dollars or change our ticker symbol every time we want to generate a headline. Now can …