Dear Readers,

I have a favour to ask. Please register for the first hands-on workshop about programming CouchDB.

Here is the story:

With my slight NADD infection I have, of course, set up a Google Alert on CouchDB. A few weeks ago, an alert came in that surprised me. Fortunately in a good way. The call for papers of the 2008 edition of XTech, a (duh) tech conference in Dublin, Ireland, asked specifically for CouchDB related submission.

How cool is that?

I sent in a whole bunch of proposals, just to make sure one gets through and it …

Dear Readers,

I have a favour to ask. Please register for the first hands-on workshop about programming CouchDB.

Here is the story:

With my slight NADD infection I have, of course, set up a Google Alert on CouchDB. A few weeks ago, an alert came in that surprised me. Fortunately in a good way. The call for papers of the 2008 edition of XTech, a (duh) tech conference in Dublin, Ireland, asked specifically for CouchDB related submission.

How cool is that?

I sent in a whole bunch of proposals, just to make sure one gets through and it …

The MySQL User's conference will be held in less than a month from now!!!

This year there is quite a good number of sessions on adding your own functions and procedures, such as:

• 
  
• Advanced Stored Procedures
  
• A Tour of External Language Stored Procedures for MySQL
  
• Code Generators for MySQL Plugins and User Defined Functions (UDFs)
  
• …

There will be a MySQL meetup on the start date for all of the US employees this next Monday, March 24th, at 7PM at the Elysian in Seattle.

We will provide beer, quesadillas and nachos, and giving away t-shirts (first come first serve). Come find out all about the integration of Sun and MySQL.

The Summer of Code is back.

Students, if you want to apply for a project with MySQL, be aware of the timeline.

What you need to do now, before the submission for application opens, is to discuss the ideas already published or suggest new ones using the mailing list.
This year there is an interesting …

Just a quick note to let folks in the Bay Area know about a cocktail party celebrating the Sun acquisition of MySQL. Come meet both MySQL and Sun folks, ask them questions, and most importantly, just have fun. The reception is at Jillian's @ The Metreon, 101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, and starts at 5:00pm. You can download a flyer that has directions to the venue.

MySQL acquisition by Sun is having immediate effects on my work. While so far I have been concentrating on international community, neglecting my home country, mostly because of lack of an office in Italy, I will now have more chances to attend to the community near me.
My first occasion to work under Sun's flag will be at the Sun Tech day in Naples.
The Tech days are events where some experienced Sun technologists show how things work to an interested and skilled audience (an university is a very good place for this). The attendees have a chance to see the action and to have the experts at their disposal to ask questions and discuss the trends.
This event was already scheduled when the acquisition was announced. So this time I will sneak in with a short participation. There will be more such events, where MySQL will have a more prominent …

Hi Workbench Users,

Now that we got the RC1 out, I would like to start collecting ideas of what you would like to see in the MySQL Workbench 5.1 release that will happen later this year.

Our current plan is (apart to improve the existing features and workflow) to add one major feature for WB 5.1 - and that is SQL querying functionality. Please think of it as an improved, extended MySQL Query Browser embedded right into the MySQL Workbench framework.

My vision is to turn MySQL Workbench into a fully featured SQL IDE. The single tool a MySQL database developer needs to start up to do all his database work.

A few key points that come to my mind.

• Database schema design, creation and maintenance (already there)
• Default data management (”CREATE INSERTS”, already there, can be improved)
• Database SQL querying
• Result set handling (like in QB, but improved)
…

Not sure about prizes yet. I have Open Query pencils (recycled newspaper) and they're transactional with rollback (the eraser ;-) but perhaps I'll come up with something else for this. Anyway, your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is:

Design a MySQL schema, and show me some sample queries (to prove your design works), for doing the following. Given a database of recipes that each contain a number of ingredients, I want to crossmatch this against what I have in my pantry/fridge/cocktailcabinet and find out which recipes I can actually make!

Depending on how you do it this may not seem too complicated; then go to the next step with possible substitute ingredients. This happens both with cooking as well as with cocktails. Devise some kind of equivalence magic (like a soundex for ingredients ;-)

Enjoy! Have some nice chocolate eggs too.
…

I live in a town that is the nemesis of e-commerce applications. The name of my town is Quartu Sant'Elena
Notice that the name contains an apostrophe, which for all practical purposes is represented by a single quote.
Single quotes have a bad reputation, because they may be a symptom of SQL injection. Whenever I enter the name of my town in a web form to buy something, I hold my breath, because I dread what comes next.
The smartest applications have a Ajax interface with online completion, and take the name of the town without problems. The less advanced ones show a multiple choice list containing my town name.
The bad ones refuse the name of the town as invalid, and force me to enter an alternate spelling (Quartu S.Elena), which is recognized by most Italians as being equivalent.
The very bad ones, after forcing me to …