As noted already in March and described more closely in July, we had a MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg, opened up for selected members of the MySQL community. Since yesterday, I’m back and reflecting upon how it all went.

The first reflection is that I’m biased, since I was organising the meeting together with above all Patrik Backman (for the agenda) and Georg Richter (for the lion’s share of all real work, such as the coordination with our venue, Marriott Hotel). But I would still like to concur with the many MySQLers who think it was “the best MySQL Developers Meeting ever“.

So what made the meeting a success?

We got plenty of work done. Our motto was “Working Together“, making use …

Hot on the heels of the MySQL Japan User?s Conference, the Japanese-language versions of the Developer and DBA certification exams were published on Sep. 25.

This means that the following exams are now available in Japanese:

• 003-002 : Certified MySQL 5.0 Developer Part I
• 004-002 : Certified MySQL 5.0 Developer Part II
• 005-002 : Certified MySQL 5.0 DBA Part I
• 006-002 : Certified MySQL 5.0 DBA Part II

As always, the exams are available through Pearson VUE, and all 121 Japanese testing centers are standing by to help you with the exams.

For more information on the Japanese certification exams, see http://www-jp.mysql.com/certification/

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Seklos just posted a story on his Oracle blog on how he installed Oracle 10something in less than an hour.

I found the story hilarious. why . because about a decade ago .. when I was still into database & webdevelopment, Oracle first started shipping Oracle for Linus (somewhere in 99)
Back then some collegue had been struggling for a couple of days already to setup up Oracle on a Windows box and was thinking to just use SQL server.
So I went home found the famous CD with the typo (or did I really get the CD that should have been shipped to Finland ?) in my mailbox and as I had a new Siemens Server sitting in my basement, I installed a fresh RedHat and on a machine I never had seen before (that's the ninetees I`m talking about so no fancy just install it on most common hardware and it will work like we have these days) and then went on installing an Oracle …

While working on MySQLDump.java this weekend I decided to look into the new features that are heading our way in MySQL 5.1. It cannot be long before we see a general release and I needed to start thinking of ways to backup items like Events. This also made a good opportunity to start afresh with my dev server and try out the latest Solaris 10 8/07 release with GlassFish v2, the releases just keep coming! (SXDE 9/07 was just released).

The Solaris 10 install was as smooth as previous releases (Using Text Based) …

Are you a brand-newbie to MySQL? Coming from another database (or databases)? If so, here are some concepts to read up on right away to ease your confusion down the road. These are the top things I wish someone had told me about before I did anything else with MySQL.

(I’ve had a lot of questions along these lines, and have posted on all of each of these items somewhere, but thought it’d be more helpful to gather the points together into one place.)

MY TOP 2 “BEFORE YOU BEGIN” TOPICS

#1: storage engines. Before you do any big planning, if you don’t know what a “storage engine” is, find out!
I can’t think of a good analogy for what a storage engine is. The best I can come up with is, you know how with Oracle you choose your index types (btree? bitmap? etc)? In MySQL, you choose your table types (and with them, the index types). Your choice determines a lot. Each storage engine (table …

Due to some discrepancies between the Eclipse 3.2.2 compiler and Sun's javac we needed to upgrade our development environments to Eclipse 3.3. Otherwise we could not tell for sure that something that looked ok in Eclipse would compile in the daily build process.

Even though I had used 3.3 privately for some time now, there is always some tension when switching a whole bunch of developers in a really large project.

At first everything seemed fine, apart from some minor issues that could be easily worked around.

However I ran into a nasty little bug regarding the CVS integration when I had to switch a workspace that had been checked out on HEAD to another branch. That branch had been created to keep the Helpers- and Utilities-Refactoring I wrote about before separate from the HEAD until it is complete.

As I sit in the lobby, taking a break, waiting to leave to the airport for my next destination, I just think about what a great week I’ve had. Its been packed, with just far too much to do. Mornings starting at 4.30am and nights ending at 3am just seem so normal. I’ve taken a ridiculous number of photos, which I hope will make their way online slowly, but expect to see them even in the following month.

At the team exhibitions…

One of the great things about the Heidelberg DevMeeting was being able to interact with my team a lot. Being in a distributed environment, I must say this is the most face-to-face time we’ve had just to hang out, talk, eat, get stuff done, drink, walk around, socialise, etc. Its highly amazing. Really. Don’t even think about doing so at the …

I'm really grateful to Zack Urlocker for his post today on how MySQL competes against Google et al in the hiring department. More importantly (for me), he discusses how MySQL closes the distance its employees may feel while working in a highly distributed company:

So that means that they don't have to commute, they don't have to hang out in boring HR meetings, they can just focus on what they like, which is coding. We may not have all the perks offered by big companies, but at the end of the day, developers know they are working on something important and they can do it from their home rather than relocating to Silicon Valley....

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