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 …

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 …