I’m involved in the authoring of two books at the moment - both using different tools, neither of which would be my choice if it was up to me. One is using DocBook, writing raw incredibly verbose XML… which honestly, isn’t that much fun. The other is in Microsoft Word (well, OpenOffice.org Writer for me). The last time I really used Microsoft Word really seriously was probably around 1998/1999 with Office 98 on the Mac. It was a pretty awesome suite of software actually. Especially after the update that fixed a few crashing bugs :)

One thing I do notice though is the collaboration tools in OOo Writer are nowhere near good enough. The notes are small yellow rectangles where you either have to hold the mouse cursor over them to read them (ick, slow) or double click them and scroll right forever to read the whole or in conjunction with the last way, use the object browser.

Also, track changes doesn’t really …

“How can you manage your cross-cultural teams at MySQL, with people from over 25 different countries, with a variety of nationalities, native languages, religions, political beliefs, and value systems? And how can you get anything done when four out of five MySQLers work out of their home office, not meeting regularly face to face?”

I would lie to you if I said that the above issues are easy. They aren’t. And that is why people frequently ask me those questions. Yet, the main challenge is not cultural diversity or virtual offices. The main challenge is timezones.

My direct reports work in my own timezone (Central Europe), but also on the US East Coast, on the US West Coast, and in Australia. This covers most of the timezones I actively work with, with the exception that I also have frequent calls with my colleagues in Finland (on Eastern European time), and sometimes with the …

One exercise in our MySQL 5.0 for Developers asks for the list of country names where people speak French but not English. Of course, the world sample database is required for this.

The typical solution which we also provide in ouur training material goes like this. SELECT Country.Name FROM Country JOIN CountryLanguage ON Country.Code=CountryLanguage.CountryCode WHERE CountryLanguage.Language='French' AND CountryLanguage.CountryCode NOT IN (SELECT CountryCode FROM CountryLanguage WHERE Language='English');

You can also use subselects only. SELECT Name FROM Country WHERE Code IN (SELECT CountryCode FROM CountryLanguage WHERE Language = 'French' AND CountryCode NOT IN (SELECT CountryCode FROM CountryLanguage WHERE Language = 'English'));

This weeks class came up with a simple solution not using any subselect at all.

Sql Server 2005 has a command line tool named sqlcmd. MySQL has a command line tool named mysql. Oracle has a command line tool called sqlplus. They can all be used for interactive query processing and batch scripts processing. They do similar things, albeit in different ways. They are functionally equivalent.

For Sql Server 2005, when in interactive mode of sqlcmd, use

:r c:MyFolderMyScript.sql

to read and execute a script file. You may have to type

go

afterwards, if the last line of the script file does not end with the word go.

To use sqlcmd in batch mode, that is, to run a sql script and then get out, use:

sqlcmd -i c:MyFolderMyScript.sql -S MyServerName -E

Replace -E with -U LoginName if you use Sql authentication

For MySQL, while in interactive mode of mysql, use

. c:MyFolderMyScript.sql (on Windows)

Note there should be a backward …

SugarCRM Announces 1,000 Customers and 1,000,000 Open Source Downloads, SugarCRM (Press Release)

solidDB for MySQL Sets Performance Record in Public Benchmark, Solid Information Technology (Press Release)

Scalix and SugarCRM Integrate Messaging and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Linux and Open Source Customers, Scalix / SugarCRM (Press Release)

Alfresco Announces First Embedded Enterprise Content Management System, Alfresco Software (Press Release)

Solegy …

Now, I should probably be a good Planet MySQLer and check the MySQL Forge at http://forge.mysql.com, but Dean Swift’s “mystery festive stored procedure” linked at http://deepselect.blogspot.com/2006/12/merry-christmas.html is a pretty good interview question for a candidate. I would include the hint that it’s a Christmasy stored procedure.

I laughed out loud when I figured it out. I didn’t actually run it, but read the stored procedure to see if I could puzzle it out. And so I did. It took a few minutes, and I had to copy and paste it to a buffer that used word wrap and format it properly.

But this will show how good someone is under pressure. If you give it to them and walk away, there will be less pressure. Either way, …

Happy Chanukah and Merry Christmas to you! Just in time for the holidays, Solid has released the Generally Available version of solidDB for MySQL. Features of the GA release include:

• Both pessimistic and optimistic tables can now be specified in create table
• Performance enhancements
• New configuration parameters
• Documentation extended
• Online backup supported and documented
• New admin command checkpoint now supported and documented
• Support for insert into … on duplicate key … added
• Support for insert or update ignore added
• Support for drop table cascade added
• Support for geometry type added

Bits are available at http://dev.soliddb.com/download/ or you can go to a local mirror at our solidDB project at the …

Has anyone used MySQL Turbo Manager? What do they think?

From: http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=36474

Mentat Technologies, Inc. announced it will offer MySQL Turbo Manager Free Edition, a brand new, free graphical tool for database development and administration. With MySQL Turbo Manager Free Edition, you can browse database objects, run SQL statements and SQL scripts, edit and execute Stored Procedures. MySQL Turbo Manager works with any MySQL Server versions from 3.2.3 to 5.1 and supports all MySQL objects and all MySQL options.

You can download MySQL Turbo Manager Free Edition at: http://www.mentattech.com/themes/mentat/download.html

By Tim O'Reilly

While on a recent trip to Germany, I was interviewed about Web 2.0 by Der Spiegel. The interviewer focused on whether or not I'm getting tired of the froth around Web 2.0, but my own favorite bit of the exchange was this one:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: A thought experiment on the wisdom of crowds. Say you have a visitor from another planet, an alien, and you want to show him human culture. Would you show him the top ten videos on YouTube? Or a random sample of MySpace pages?

O'Reilly: No. There is an American comedian {Jack Handy] whose answer to that question was: "[We'd say] 'This isn't really our civilization, it's just something we're playing around with. Come back …

To show our gratitude towards those who help us, and to help MySQL users help us even better, we will soon be announcing a “Quality Contributor Programme“. As we have identified the best contributors of 2006 based on submitted bug reports, I asked a number of people last Friday and Saturday whether they would accept to be listed on our Quality Contributor list on our website at dev.mysql.com.

I am overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of the response during the past 48 hours. Let me already now give some pre-announcement recognition to some of those who have helped us make MySQL better.

Don’t worry: we do understand that the main reason users report bugs is to get them fixed. However, we still think we have plenty of opportunities of improving our ways when it comes to making it easier for you to help us, even if our bug fixing capacity should remain unchanged. Expect to soon hear more about this from …