The MySQL Community team led by Jay Pipes is putting together MySQL Camp, an "un-conference" that will be held November 10-12 in Mountain View, California. This is not a fancy formal gathering, just an opportunity for smart folks from the MySQL community to gather together, share notes, ideas, best practices, do some brainstorming and maybe hack on some code!  There's a range of proposed topics but half the fun will be seeing what comes together on one unstructured weekend.  If you're in the bay area, check it out. This is a low-key, non-corporate event designed for folks who want to participate and not just be observers.

• MySQLCamp.org: Home, …

When I was upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1 I noticed the internal 'mysql' database had tables of reference data. This allows clients to get help directly from the server instead of browsign the online docs at mysql.com. This is convenient when you are not connected to the internet.....

A Federated Table is a table which points to a table in an other MySQL database instance (mostly on an other server). It can be seen as a view to this remote database table. Other RDBMS have similar concepts for example database links.

class Guard {
public:
Guard(NdbMutex *mtx) : m_mtx(mtx) { NdbMutex_Lock(m_mtx); };
Guard(NdbLockable & l) : m_mtx(l.m_mutex) { NdbMutex_Lock(m_mtx);
};
~Guard() { NdbMutex_Unlock(m_mtx); };
private:
NdbMutex *m_mtx;
};

Traffic at www.mysql.com has continued to increase and over the last few months, we've broken into the top 500 websites according to Alexa.  While the Alexa rankings are not perfect, they do enable relative comparisons between sites and over time.  For example, MySQL's traffic surpassed Oracle's back in April of this …

It's been an interesting last few weeks for me and MySQL. One of my side projects (I currently have three, two are MySQL-focused) provided an opportunity to really dig into the MySQL source code (5.1 tree). For many of my evenings for the past few weeks I've been hacking away, fiddling with the kind of MySQL customizations I've previously only seen other folks do.

The list of customizations:

• 
  
• build a user defined function (UDF) that gets dynamically loaded into MySQL
  
• add a new native (built-in) function to the MySQL source code
  
• create a storage engine using the pluggable storage engine architecture
  
• create a new SHOW command
  
• create a new virtual table in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database
  

And of course, while I was in there I threw …

Swedish telecom vendor Teligent has employed several different databases in its products in the past -- including Oracle, Berkeley DB and Microsoft SQL Server -- but now the company has chosen MySQL Cluster to be the standard for its Teligent P90/E platform, on which its products are based. Teligent supplies innovative network services like voice message systems, Mobile data and VoIP to operators like British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, TeliaSonera and Vodafone.

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   |
...
+---------------------------+------------------------+-----------------------------------+