I'm finishing up my presentation for the upcoming COSS.fi event next week (4/19/07), and was exploring an idea - how do you compete when the code is open? - when two things happened in quick succession.

One, I was reading the Bible and came across this interesting verse from Genesis:

...Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.... [Genesis 3:17-19]

In other words, it's good to have to wade through difficulty. That's where growth comes from. There are no magic shortcuts to prosperity.

Second, I read Mike Olson's response to some criticism that I and Stephen O'Grady had heaped upon his …

In the spirit of humor, here are 2 ways I know I am a MySQL geek. These are actually things I do….

You Know You’re a MySQL Geek When….
1. You cannot type the word “myself” without typing “mysql” first, deleting 2 characters and finishing out the word.
2. You type “show processlist” at the commandline when you really mean “ps -ef”

Anyone have anything they can add to the list?

I'm proud to welcome Luke Welling to OmniTI. Luke is a prominent member of the open source community, probably best known as the co-author (along with Laura) of one of the best selling open source books of all time, PHP and MySQL Web Development. Those who know him are more familiar with his keen sense of humor and undying urge to bait people for his own amusement.

He is working with me as part of our growing web application security practice, focusing on three key areas:

Security Training Program

Help clients avoid security problems. (Teach …

Welcome to the 40th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. In celebration of this special number, LB has gone out and bought itself a sexy new sports car in which it plans to ride around with a younger, blonde blog. The MySQL User Conference & Expo is very close, so it’s [...]

I wrote a few days ago about the keynote I'm hoping will lead to some wonderful on-stage fireworks — the Clash of the Database Egos. The keynote has had a late addition: the creator of InnoDB, Heikki Tuuri. I'm certain a number of you out there had wondered how we could have a clas of the database egos without Heikki participating. I assure you, there wasn't any ill intent for not having Heikki originally listed on the clash speaker list. More of a time pressure thing from my end, nothing more.

Our most excellent facilitator, …

At the MySQL Conference & Expo April 23-26 in Santa Clara, we'll be introducing for the first time the idea of a "Guru Bar."  Taking a tip from Apple's highly successful in-store "genius bar" (which I've found to deliver excellent service" we decided to up the ante at our conference.  Our Guru Bar will be staffed by top notch MySQL gurus including our System Engineers, Developers, Consultants, Training and Support Engineers.  You can come by, bring your technical challenges or problems and we'll help you resolve them. Heck, bring your toughest problem, your laptops and your teams and we'll work together with you to solve them right there at the conference.  …

Lenz made a good summary of the DotOrg Pavilion exhibitors at the Expo part of the MySQL Conference & Expo ten days from now. To recap, the DotOrg Pavilion is a part of the exhibition area reserved for Open Source projects. Our attempt has been to collect the DotOrg pavilion to be a mecca for OSS enthusiasts, writers, speakers, and advocates. We are fortunate to have attracted some of the world’s most recognised free software organisations, and new up and coming projects.

A related type of reason to register for the conference are the …

Today, doing one small task I thought: “Why can’t I do it with PowerShell?”
So, here is a small example:

[void][system.reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom("c:\devel\mysql\ps\MySQL.Data.dll")

$myconnection = New-Object MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlConnection
$myconnection.ConnectionString = "server=localhost;user id=test;password=test;database=test;pooling=false"
$myconnection.Open()

$mycommand = New-Object MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlCommand
$mycommand.Connection = $myconnection
$mycommand.CommandText = "SHOW TABLES"

$myreader = $mycommand.ExecuteReader()

while($myreader.Read()){ $myreader.GetString(0) }

--
c:\devel\mysql\ps\MySQL.Data.dll - that is a connector

PowerShell is a quiet new thing, so I believe it could be helpfull.

Yes, that’s right — you can get MySQL certified for no cost at all.

“How does this work?” I hear you ask.

Step 1: Attend the MySQL Conference & Expo (If you haven’t already signed up, that particular part isn’t quite “free” of course. But that just begs the question “Why haven’t you done that yet? It’s only a few days away!)

Step 2: Locate Carsten, Roland or one of the other people from the MySQL certification team there. On Tuesday, we will be outside the Magnolia room (where the exams take place) during testing hours. You can also catch people on Monday, when they are giving primer tutorials on the Cluster, …

There has been some late updates to our Keynote sessions for the Users Conference. The keynotes presentations are given Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in the morning for the entire conference audience, in the combined Ballrooms E-H. I think we have quite an exciting group of visionaries, technologists and influentials:

Tuesday morning keynotes 24 April 2007

• 8:20-9:05: Welcome and State of MySQL AB, Mårten Mickos, MySQL AB, CEO gives an update on how MySQL AB is doing, including a view behind the scenes of the business, the vision, …