This is a post from a few months back which somehow got stuck. I’m publishing it now as it still holds true.
I read an article today which mentioned “supernova burnout”, describing it as burnout that occurs when someone has reached the pinnacle of their career (I’m paraphrasing from memory here). The recommended solution? Find a cause that you are passionate about, and find a way to work it into your life.

Want to know what I’m passionate about? Taking care of my family. That will add purpose and meaning to any job. Something I love about working at MySQL is that I can work from home, which means I get to see my family a LOT more than I have in years past. Somehow there is just no substitute for being present.
I’m also passionate about programming, and sharing knowledge with other people. The book Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective highlights just how important it is to have access to the …

The MySQL Users Group in Brisbane (QLD, Australia) now has 100 members, after starting less than 2 years ago! We've had pretty much regular monthly meetings since the beginning, with a decent variety of speakers and topics. Brisbane also has strong PHP and Linux groups, so there's some competition and overlap...

The Call for Participation for the 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo has just opened: an invitation for database experts and enthusiasts to share their knowledge of MySQL with the global open source community. The theme for the 2007 conference is "Scale to New Heights with MySQL." This annual event brings nearly 2,000 MySQL developers, DBAs, users, and partners together in Santa Clara, California. The Call for Participation ends November 7, 2006; the conference takes place April 23-26, 2007.

MySQL AB is building on its European organisation. With a new sales office in the Netherlands, MySQL will focus on supporting corporate customers and users throughout the Benelux region.

I was poking around in the MySQL source code, namely in sql/sql_yacc.yy, and found a hidden treat: there’s a SHOW COLUMN TYPES command. It’s fun to read source code! The command is undocumented, but does work. It returns just two rows, which give information about TINYINT and TINYINT UNSIGNED. And it has been in the source for a long time, certainly since version 4.1.21. There’s even a status counter for it in the SHOW STATUS command: Com_show_column_types.

I set out Monday morning to Perros-Guirec, a village at the west coast of France, west from St-Malo. We have an important meeting with MySQL customer and I had to be there. Everything was carefully planned, I had my tickets and I knew when to leave.. on time..

Well, it didn't go the way I expected..


So I set out at 05:30 to the train station of Aschaffenburg to Darmstadt. Train was at 06:06 and would arrive like 06:52 just in time to take the train to Paris at 07:02. I managed to stay awake, but when lots of people got on train I got distracted and a bit dreaming away. I heard the speaker say 'Darmstadt' and I get out. But …

Amid recent discussions about calling MySQL stored procedures from PHP or similar API-type interfaces, and mentions of difficulties in doing so, I thought I would post some notes about my experiences. When I first tried to use stored procedures from PHP, I discovered that it worked some of the time, but I did not take the time to delve into the whys or the wherefores. It was also mentioned by some that the mysqli interface was necessary in order to properly interact with stored procedures, but I have since determined that that is in fact not the case. I now conclude that the mysql interface works with stored procedures just fine, and that is fine with me since I am perfectly at home with this interface.

The only issue appears to be when returning a resultset. It's not at all intuitive, but in order to return a resultset from a stored procedure to PHP, one must have either the multiple-statements connect option or the multiple-results …

Step by step Apache Friends becomes more international: After the translation of our website into (traditional) Chinese Apache Friends now also reaches the South American continent: Kudos to André Domarques, who spend over the last weeks much of his spare time for the translation of all our website contents into Brazilian Portuguese.

To the Brazilian Portuguese translation

OK, so I returned from vacation late last night, after putting almost 1700 miles on my car this past four days. A friend of mine had his Master's thesis show (in furniture design) down in Savannah, Georgia. It was a fantastic time, and Ezra's work is truly astonishing, but I was quite exhausted after the long drives to and from Columbus, Ohio.

You may remember that I have been helping my twin brother learn PHP and MySQL programming. I'm pleased to say that he is progressing quite well! Every time we Skype chat, he seems to have picked up more and more programming vocabulary and is understanding some of the trickier concepts fairly well. My teaching is ongoing. I have advised him to try and learn five new PHP functions every time he sits down to code, and to practice the functions by using them in his work. For instance, …

Yesterday evening I finally released the procedure converter at Sourceforge.net. I am quite satisfied with the result, it covers quite a lot. But the user interface is virtuallt non-existant, and the parsing needs some improvement. The problem is that for more complex conversion tasks (like shifting order for function parameters) I would need better parsing of the source code.

Features:

1. converts CREATE PROCEDURE/FUNCTION syntax
2. adds semi-colon at the end of statements
3. converts IF and WHILE statements to MySQL syntax
4. sorts the code in the correct order, with declarations at the top and instructions
5. after that
6. removes @, [ and ] from identifiers
7. converts comments to MySQL syntax (a space in the 3rd position for -- comments)
8. adds a CONTINUE HANDLER FOR NOT FOUND if the procedure contains cursors
9. comments out GOTO and …