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

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 …