If you happen to use MySQL and live around Hamburg, Germany, here's your chance to meet with other MySQL users, developers and DBAs: I am happy to announce the second Hamburg MySQL Usergroup Meeting, which will take place on Monday, 3rd of July, 19:00. The location will be the same one as last time, the chinese restaurant Ni Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek.  The food there is quite excellent and they will provide us with a separate room and video projector again. I'll try to arrange a presentation about MySQL and there will be plenty of time for chatting and discussing. If you'd like to join us, please RSVP via our event page on meetup.com and join the mailing list for further details! Looking forward to meeting you! Some pictures of our last meeting are available …

This might be handy

Jeroen Swart, one of the most capable and knowledgable Microsoft .NET Professionals I know, provided me with a pointer to www.connectionstrings.com. This site lists connection string formats for a whole bunch of databases. Of course, Oracle, MySQL and MS SQL are there, as are Postgres and DB2.

But what about Mimer? Lightbase? Right, that's why you might visit them.

Actually, there are also some products missing, like HSQL and SQLite and what have you. And they could pick a nicer Icon for MySQL. Otherwise, handy site.

I'm continuing my experiments with different OS and today I tested FreeBSD 6.0 on my box.
(more details about box and benchmark see here http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/06/13/quick-look-at-ubuntu-606/).
Initially I was very pessimistic about FreeBSD, as results were (in transactions/sec, more is better.
for comparison the results from Suse 10.0):

As I mentioned here, I?m a member of the documentation team at MySQL, a job I started back in April. I?ve just completed a major tranche of documentation, and thought it would be interesting to let you guys know exactly what happens in a typical day for a member of the documentation team.

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There are some proposed changes in the Australian copyright law that are just too weird.

Australia has its newish free-trade agreement with the US, and so is now harmonising some of its laws. Unfortunately, things are being tightened without the corresponding "fair use" clauses that are part of the equivalent US legislation, and some flawed US stuff like the DMCA is also finding its way into the Australian proposals... laws have a fairly long cycle. The DMCA may get fixed at some point, but a new Australian law will take years again to pick up any such changes.

So, about the new copyright proposals:The proposed changes include allowing individuals to record a television program but only allowing a single viewing before it must be deleted.
The proposed laws also make it illegal to lend recorded programs to friends …

In recent articles I explained how I've optimized queries on some large tables at my current employer, and how I've written archiving and purging jobs to trim the tables down to a manageable size. This article explains how I re-indexed some of those tables without taking the server offline.

For those still interested, there is now an official job posting at the MySQL web site at http://www.mysql.com/company/jobs/tech-writer.html:

The MySQL documentation team is looking for another technical writer. For this we need the best and the most dedicated people around. You may work from anywhere in the world as long as you have the necessary skills and technical facilities to communicate across the Internet. Projects are coordinated from Germany, but our team members are expected to work independently.

You should be prepared to work intensively with our developers when writing new documentation (in English, so you should be a native English speaker), or changing existing documentation. Of course, you should have in-depth knowledge of MySQL, and we’d appreciate if you were MySQL certified. As a technical writer, you should have proven experience …

One of my first major tasks at MySQL has just been completed - a major rewrite of the Connector/ODBC (C/ODBC) documentation.

There were three major focuses for the rewrite:

1. Bring the documentation up to date. We had a mix of information on the latest release (currently 3.51, but 5.0 is currently in development), but many of the sections didn’t reflect that new version. There is also new information on how to install the driver on Mac OS X.
2. Restructure the information. This is something I’m doing across the board on the Connectors docs, as I try to re-organize them all into a more coherent, and compatible, structure. For example, I’ve collated all of the tips about using C/ODBC with different applications into their own section, organized by application. I’ve also extended the information; for example we now have a …

It's no secret that MySQL is widely deployed in most leading web sites.  Everyone knows how successful the LAMP stack has become and that companies like Google, Yahoo, Sabre, Evite, Citysearch all use tons of open source software (including MySQL) to scale their operations.  As important as all of these companies are, I'm most proud of the fact that MySQL is used at Wikipedia.  This is one of the top web sites in the world and not only is it built on open source software (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Lucene) and the MediaWiki project. 

Wikipedia is famous not just for being a highly scalable open source project, but more importantly, it is an open and collaborative repository of human knowledge.  There are more than 1 million articles in the english language edition of Wikipedia and there are smaller versions in more than 100 languages.  And all of …

Arjen’s MySQL Community Journal - HyperThreading? Not on a MySQL server…

I blame the Linux Process Scheduler. At least it’s better than the earlier 2.6 days where things would get shunted a lot from one “cpu” to the other “cpu” for no real reason.

Newer kernel verisons are probably better… but don’t even think of HT and pre-2.6 - that would be funny.