The International PHP Conference in Frankfurt is coming up again, 5-8 November. Running in parallel is the Open Source Database Conference (reg is free if you're at the PHP conf).

I'll be doing a tutorial and a few sessions:

• Power Workshop: MySQL 5.1 in Depth
• MySQL Falcon Storage Engine
  
• An Introduction to MySQL Cluster: Architecture and Use
  
• Confession Time: Deadly Sins using MySQL and PHP

Check out the site for all the details. Of course there's plenty of other sessions and tutorials from some great PHP and database experts, including Giuseppe Maxia and Peter Zaitsev on MySQL.

Perhaps I'll see you there?
I'll actually be travelling on to The Netherlands afterwards (holiday) , with my wife Harmony and daughter Phoebe. So if you're at the conference you can meet them too! …

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It's inevitable that if you play in the MySQL source code for long enough you'll eventually stumble into the source for the show authors command and be tempted to do something with it:

mysql> show authors;
+---------------------------+------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Name                      | Location               | Comment                           |
+---------------------------+------------------------+-----------------------------------+
...
| Mike Kruckenberg          | Boston, MA, USA        | Just one line of code, this one   |
...
+---------------------------+------------------------+-----------------------------------+

Some more tools were added to my collection.

Some more database benchmarks were added to my collection.

There is a huge number of support forums for MySQL, such as MySQL's Forums, and hundreds more for regional, language and application specific discussion.

However, the MySQL group on Yahoo seems to be abandoned. This is quite a shame, because the group often peaked more than 3000 messages per month and the archive has thousands of messages. A search for PHP returns more than 5000 messages. Anyhow, I asked Yahoo's support what could be done to re-activate this forum. Actually, its quite simple: its done democratically:

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Groups.

I can understand your concern with the mysql group. Due to our Privacy Policy, we cannot appoint a new owner to the group. If the owner cannot be contacted, one alternative is for you to create your own group and send out invitations to those people who you would like to join your new group.

Since the group …

I came across Sphinx today via the MySQL Performance Blog (which has some good entries you might want to check out). It is an Open Source Full Text SQL Search Engine. It can be installed as a storage engine type on MySQL, and from what I hear can beat the pants off of MySQL's built-in full text search in some cases.

From the web site:

Generally, it's a standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant fulltext search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting …

The time between Beta 1 and Beta 2 has been dominated by two events;

1. an additional ODBC person (new hire) allocated to Connectors Team
2. my two week vacation to Europe

The end result is a Beta with some improvements;

• a proper GUI installer
• some porting work for UNIX
• improved internal documentation

There is still much to do so look for us to continue with frequent releases.

The first ever Phoenix MySQL Meetup is less than a week away. While there are a few more members now, the inaugural event will most likely be just a few people. I am curious to see how this develops and how many other MySQL types there are in the Valley, especially as more companies are coming here that make use of or partner with MySQL in some way.