Near the end of a two weeks vacation in southern Italy, I combined pleasure and business and took the 4 to 5 upgrade exams, which I passed, to achieve both MySQL 5 DBA and Developer certifications.
I took both exams today in Palermo, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Now I am back to full-time tourist for a few more days.

Recently, MySQL Cluster developer and team leader Martin Sköld committed some major revisions and additions in the storage/ndb/ndbapi-examples directory of the MySQL 5.1 source. Although I don’t think these have yet been pushed out to the public 5.1 tree, I went ahead late last week and added them to the Practical Examples section of the NDB API Guide so that interested parties can take advantage of a number of corrections and other improvelements that Martin’s made.

There’s two new additions, also — here and here — these demonstrate for the first time in the Guide the use of the API with multiple clusters. You might find these particularly useful if …

Sheeri talked a little about MySQL Triggers in One TRIGGER Fact, Optimizer Rewriting Stuff. While it’s great that MySQL 5.0 has Triggers, there are some things that I feel could become features in future releases.

IF EXISTS

One of the beautiful features that MySQL has is IF EXISTS. This ternary operation that if the object exists performs the operation, of not it does nothing works wonders in reviewing logs for errors. One of the problems with Oracle for example, is the requirement to ignore the ORA errors for non-existent objects.

But this functionality doesn’t exist for Triggers? One must wonder why. I’d like to see this.

mysql> DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS trigger_name;

MySQL Manual DROP …

Tandem-Forum has signed an agreement with MySQL AB to become an Authorized MySQL Training Center (AMEC) and will immediately begin to offer MySQL 5.0 training in Moscow, Russia.

New review up at http://www.openwin.org/mike/index.php/books/mysql-phrasebook/.

Short version: I like it.

Eventually every database system hit its limits. Especially on the Internet, where you have millions of users which theoretically access your database simultaneously, eventually your IO system will be a bottleneck.

Question: How can I monitor the basic database related system information for my MySQL host?

Answer: The following monitoring utilities can be used to montitor your MySQL host and database:

The MySQL documentation team has released a companion manual to accompany the new single installer for all MySQL GUI tools in the form of a unified manual for all GUI tools, available as a PDF at http://downloads.mysql.com/docs/guibook-en.pdf.

Should be worth keeping on hand if you are a heavy GUI user.