I suppose most readers get the contents of this blog through planetmysql — if you do, you can stop reading here.

If you do not subscribe to planetmysql, you may have missed out on Dave Stoke’s excellent writings on the subject of MySQL certification. Dave has been busy analyzing the results of previous certification exams, and he has authored several articles on the subject in the past few weeks.

Go read’em.

I think last time I attended FOSDEM it was not yet called like that.. was it 2001? Yeah, think so. Well, now 7 years later, I'm working for MySQL and I'm going back. Together with couple of other colleagues (Suzanne, Hartmut, Lenz, Jan, Roland, ..), we're going to be hanging around, and hopefully meet new colleagues from Sun. I'm even invited for a dinner-meeting with some PostgreSQL dude!

The session I'm most interested in is from Kris Buytaert, talking about MySQL Cluster and Drupal. I'm specializing in Cluster within MySQL and communicating with the big Telco's. Amazing where Cluster is running, I tell you! And now, Kris talks on how to …

I just noticed that my talk "Extending MySQL" is now up on the MySQL User's Conference site. For the talk I have a couple of extra additions that I plan to show off this year.

These include my "How to add a new protocol to the server", where I show off my UDP protocol for MySQL via a plugin :)

Want to attend the conference? I have got a discount code you can use to get in for a bit less cash.

So... if you are looking for a discount on the entrance fee drop me a note.

Want to go for free next time?

Submit a proposal next year :)

I’m happy to announce that we are finally changing the location for our monthly meetings, from the dreaded University of Houston main campus to a Galleria location.

Alert Logic has agreed to host the monthly meetings at their headquarters (we are next to the Marathon Oil building), so hopefully this will make it easier for people to attend. I’m looking forward to having a real meeting room with projector and wireless internet for a change!

I’ll be updating the meeting details today, but our new location will be the following:

Alert Logic, Inc.
1776 Yorktown
7th …

I've been playing with various GUIs off and on over the last couple of months. I find that I drop to mysql.exe quite often no matter which tool I use. My favorites until recently have been the MySQL GUI Tools and NaviCat.

I was using the Lite edition of Navicat. I actually started using navicat with postgres a few years ago. I like it but the lite version is limited in some annoying ways. It's nice in that it runs (at least the mysql version) in Linux and windows. I don't use a mac so that doesn't really do anything for me.

Of course the MySQL gui tools run just about anywhere.

I just …

It might not seem like a big deal that Silicon Valley is losing its middle class - defined as those who make between $30,000 and $80,000 per year. That is, unless you want to create a company that employs normal people who make normal wages, which is just about every company on the planet.

By most accounts, Silicon Valley is doing very well, adding jobs faster than the US national average. But this lack of reasonably paid employees is worrisome:

The consequence of the shift may undercut some of the basic mechanisms of the Valley economy, according to the authors of the report, by making upward mobility more difficult. "If you lose the middle, it's harder to support the top," said Doug Henton, an economist at Collaborative Economics, a research and consulting firm in Mountain View, Calif., that helps prepare the annual report.

It's …

Yesterday I had a chance to catch up with Doug Judd, principle search architect at local search specialist Zvents, to get some insight into Hypertable, the new open source massively parallel database software project.

Hypertable is an open source (GPLv2) implementation of Google’s Bigtable, an internally-deployed database that serves the company’s web indexing, Google Earth and Google Finance services. According to Judd, the best way to think about Hypertable is as a traditional database, but one that trades advanced features like transactional capabilities for scalability: specifically thousands of commodity PCs.

While Hypertable is not designed to support transactional …

Which data type holds the greatest range of data? MEDIUMINT or INT?

Which data type may hold the largest amount of data? MEDIUMTEXT or TEXT?

(more…)

I just registered for the MySQL Conference and Expo 2008. Note that early registration closes on February 26, 2008, so if you register now, you get a really nice discount. For what its worth, speakers were given a little discount code to give away  (20% off the conference price tag), and if you’re a blog reader, and the 20% discount will help you attend the conference, by all means drop me an email (firstname at mysql dot com).

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