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.

If you happen to live somewhere around Delhi, India and you are curious to learn more about MySQL Cluster, make sure to RSVP for Kai's Workshop on this subject, which will take place on Friday, November 17, 2006, 6:00 PM at Value One, D 21 NDSE 1, Delhi. Space is limited, so hurry!

I personally will also mention MySQL Cluster during my talk about High Availability Solutions with MySQL that I will give at the Fachhochschule Oldenburg/Ostfriesland/Wilhelmshaven tomorrow.

If you happen to live somewhere around Delhi, India and you are curious to learn more about MySQL Cluster, make sure to RSVP for Kai's Workshop on this subject, which will take place on Friday, November 17, 2006, 6:00 PM at Value One, D 21 NDSE 1, Delhi. Space is limited, so hurry!

I personally will also mention MySQL Cluster during my talk about High Availability Solutions with MySQL that I will give at the Fachhochschule Oldenburg/Ostfriesland/Wilhelmshaven tomorrow.

The Programme for linux.conf.au 2007 has hit the streets (err.. web) and it’s looking pretty neat.

I’m glad to see the MySQL and PostgreSQL miniconfs on different days - means I should be able to pop into the PostgreSQL one as well. Kernel could be interesting too… I guess it can depend on the sessions and stuff though.

Greg Banks’ session on “Making NFS Suck Faster” should be interesting. Tridge’s session on “clustering tdb - a little database meets big iron” should be really interesting (after all, I hack on a clustered database for a crust). After lunch, I’m a bit torn between a few sessions - but Matthew Garrett’s “Fixing suspend for fun and profit” could be a laugh. …

Sometimes you may need to implement controlled downloads when all downloads requests being sent to your script and then this script decides what to do: to send some file to the user or to show some access denied page or, maybe, do something else. In lighttpd server it can be done by returning X-Sendfile header from script. Nginx have its own implementation of such idea using X-Accel-Redirect header. In this short post I will try to describe how to use this feature from PHP and Rails applications.

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Zend kicked off their PHP conference today with updates to their product roadmaps, a glimpse at some future developments and also strategic partnerships with MySQL and Microsoft focused on accelerating the adoption of the PHP.  Zend did a good job demonstrating the power of PHP with some cool Web 2.0 applications that use both PHP and MySQL including Flickr, Joomla!, SugarCRM, ZenCart, MediaWiki etc. Then they surprised the audience by showing that these were all running on an IBM iSeries i5 server --what used to be known as the old IBM AS400 "green screen" systems.  Given Oracle's recent moves to try to co-opt Red Hat Linux, it's good to see that IBM is serious about not just Linux but the whole LAMP stack. 

Zend also shared stats from …