Wednesday

MySQL AB’s developer meeting lasts an entire week. The community days, as they call it, are only on Thursday and Friday, but Lenz asked me to come on Wednesday night for the get-together then. I arrived five minutes after they all left without a trace.

Thursday

The developer meeting is organzied like proper conference. There are different sessions to go to in different rooms, coffee breaks and everything. The morning sessions are actual team meetings while in the afternoon there are MySQL University lessons.

MySQL University is a weekly installment where a smart person lectures about a hot topic in the MySQL world (NDB Architecture, Using BitKeeper, Running MySQL with a debugger just to name a few). They started out as MySQL internal training courses, but …

Could the two possibly go together? Oracle rocked another quarter: this is a behemoth that clearly knows how to execute.

At the same time, Oracle's Larry Ellison has nixed the idea that software as a service is worth getting out of bed for. Instead, Oracle believes selling more (and different) widgets to the same customers it already has is a winning strategy:

What I'd like to highlight here is the radically different strategies of the two companies (SAP and Oracle) for growth. Our strategy for growth is to find a way to add more value to the same customers we already serve, which are the large end of the mid-market and large companies. What we're doing here is moving beyond ERP to industry specific …

I know I’ve been away from the MySQL community for a bit….my hand injury is healing nicely, and I was able to concentrate time on things that required less typing and more mouse clicking. One such thing was the site overhaul of http://www.technocation.org to be easier to use on my side for things like embedding video and mp3 files. More user friendly for you, with regards to article names. Please feel free to vote on whether you like the new site (poll is at the top of the home page, or direct link at http://technocation.org/content/do-you-new-technocation-site%3F). You can add a comment to the poll, too, if you want to voice your opinion.

I do hope to get back into podcasting, and have one for next week. Coming very soon: Videos from MySQL Camp!

This release of MySQL Toolkit adds a new tool, fixes some minor bugs, and adds new functionality to several of the tools.

With any code base of a reasonable size there are lots of issues you would normally take care of immediately when you come across them, however often there is just no time for it. In the end you will have to live with the knowledge that you had to leave some ugly hacks in it just to meet the deadline.

Because we have recently finished development of the next major release of our software product, there is some time now to do code cleanup and get some more automated tests on the way. Because one of the bugs that almost prevented us from holding our schedule was a particularly nasty - but well hidden one - there has (again) been some discussion about coding guidelines and quality.

People always seem to agree that you need to talk to each other, think in larger terms than just your specific problem at the time and strive for code readability and re-usability. For starters I personally would sometimes even do away with just a little …

Hi,
MySQL Connector/Net 5.1.3 a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.

Connector/Net 5.1 represents a change in how we package our products. Until now, we've shipped our core provider and the Visual Studio integration bits as separate downloads. This has become a bit of a problem. Often we would fix a bug that involved changing code both in the VS package and in the core provider. This provided a versioning problem where users would need to upgrade both products to see the benefit of the bug fix. To solve this, we've decided to discontinue Tools for Visual Studio as a separate product and have, instead, integrated it into a new Connector/Net installer. We hope this provides a better "out of box" experience for our users.
All previous versions of Tools for Visual Studio should be uninstalled prior to installing this product.

Version 5.1.3 works with all versions of MySQL …

This week I presented two talks at VSLive in New York. I love speaking at this conference because of its technical focus and because I've done it so long -- eleven years -- there are always a bunch of people I run into at this conference that I only see when I'm there.

I've posted here several times about how I'd been trying to get the conference to let me talk about interesting yet sorta-non-mainstream topics such as unit testing (which I pitched to them unsuccessfully back in 2000) and open source (which I succeeded in doing in 2006 with the first talk on MySQL for .NET developers). In the past few years the conference has been much more open to talks on the kind of tools and technologies that are important to me (as well as many other developers for whom Microsoft's out-of-the-box offerings are not always sufficient).

So my "Data-Driven ASP.NET Ajax" talk is an attempt to take the ASP.NET demonstrations and tutorials that …

With any code base of a reasonable size there are lots of issues you would normally take care of immediately when you come across them, however often there is just no time for it. In the end you will have to live with the knowledge that you had to leave some ugly hacks in it just to meet the deadline.

Because we have recently finished development of the next major release of our software product, there is some time now to do code cleanup and get some more automated tests on the way. Because one of the bugs that almost prevented us from holding our schedule was a particularly nasty - but well hidden one - there has (again) been some discussion about coding guidelines and quality.

People always seem to agree that you need to talk to each other, think in larger terms than just your specific problem at the time and strive for code readability and re-usability. For starters I personally would sometimes even do away with just a little …

As stated on my first post on this blog, I’m a MySQL DBA trying to draw a map of this new (to me) world called Oracle. The other day I was trying different things with Oracle, like (but not limited to) issuing kill -9 to random Oracle processes to see what would happen (on my own box of course!). The purpose? To study STARTUP statements and recovery techniques, and to get to know a little better the Oracle SQL dialect.

I was a little surprised by the results. They’re probably no news for most of you guys, but it is new to me, and I’d like to share my findings with other MySQL guys around the planet.

I created a simple test table:

SQL> CREATE TABLE names (
name_id NUMBER NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
name    VARCHAR2(6) NOT NULL
);
  2    3    4
Table created.

So far, so good, until I saw a …

Yes it's September but it's not too early to start planning on attending the biggest and best conference dedicated to providing you with the very latest and greatest information about the database you either are or soon will be using.

No matter if your second language is SQL, C#, Java, PHP, Ruby, or Boo (!) we'll have something for you.  Or rather you'll have something for all of us!  That's right our conference is great mainly because of great presentations by our users and the 2008 call for proposals is now open!

If you have an interesting story, lesson learned, or are simply an expert in some aspect of MySQL, we want to hear from you.  Hurry, the deadline is Oct 30.  By the way, I'm especially interested in hearing about possible .NET related presentations.  I would love to see talks on .NET 3.0, Silverlight integration, Entity …