Red Hat kicked off their Summit in Nashville with over 800 attendees.  It appears that the conference is larger than last year, though still not as large as the MySQL Users Conference in April. (We had over 1,600 attendees this year.)  Red Hat has put together an excellent conference program with a broad range of speakers including Nicholas Negroponte (MIT Media Lab), Eben Moglen (FSF), Cory Doctorow (EFF).  Also, they've open up the program this year to promote Red Hat partners including MySQL, ActiveGrid, Alfresco, Zimbra, Zend and others.  MySQL's Jay Pipes and Nicolas Pujol will be doing a presentation on MySQL scale-out on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Here are a few good links …

Patrick released a new version of the perl MySQL connector. This .pm was my introduction to the mysql world, way back in the day. If you can program your way out of a perl brown paper bag and you haven’t used this tool yet, I recommend you write a hello world program to get familiar with it. Good stuff.

Dear DBD::mysql users,

This announcement comes a few days late, but DBD::mysql version 3.0004
(stable, production) and 3.0004_1 (dev) have been released!

Version 3.0004 is the production version with server-side prepare
statements turned off by default, and 3.0004_1 is the development
version with server-side prepare statements turned on by default.

The changes in 3.0004, as listed in the changelog:
  * Fix dbd_st_finish which closed the handle prematurely (Martin Evans)
  * Compile issues (Martin Evans)
  * Fix to dbd_bind_ph to deal with numbers (ints, floats) correctly
    (Alexey Stroganov)
  * Test changes - bind_param 41 and 42

The changes to …

Dear MySQL users, MaxDB users and friends,

we have moved the MaxDB series to the MySQL Developer Zone. The latest issue on Transactions is available on http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/maxdb-transactions.html . Additionally you can download a PDF document (1.86MB, 64 pages) with all articles published in the MaxDB series for offline reading and printing.

Feedback on the MaxDB series and on MaxDB in general is always welcome. Please use the MaxDB forum to send in your comments and questions.

Dear MySQL users, MaxDB users and friends,

we have moved the MaxDB series to the MySQL Developer Zone. The latest issue on Transactions is available on http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/maxdb-transactions.html . Additionally you can download a PDF document (1.86MB, 64 pages) with all articles published in the MaxDB series for offline reading and printing.

Feedback on the MaxDB series and on MaxDB in general is always welcome. Please use the MaxDB forum to send in your comments and questions.

What : dinner w/ MySQL people and users
Where: Melbourne. Nirankar Indian restaurant, Queen St (near Flinders)
When : Wednesday June 7th, 6pmI always try to catch up with my Melbourne colleagues whenever I'm there (we have 4 in Melbourne now). Excellent people and Melbourne is a nice town. This time, we thought it a nice idea to include any interested MySQL users also. So it's like an informal meetup. No talks or whatever, just chat. But of course you can interrogate us all you want! And we'd like to hear from you, about what you're doing with MySQL and any suggestions you may have.

So, MySQL users and other interested parties in Melbourne, you're most welcome to join us! Please do RSVP to me via email (my first name @ mysql.com) so we can book an appropriately sized table. The restaurant has good food, also for vegetarians and vegans. We can't pay for your dinners (sorry!) but surely we can manage a round of Kingfisher …

We knew an article was in the making about how MySQL AB, the company, is working. Today we got the link to it, read it here.

Victoria and Domas are the opening stars, but the hero of the day is our support overall leader Tom Basil!

I didn't like the fact that only Cupertino in California was mentioned as being our headquarters. MySQL is Swedish/Finnish, European. Let us not forget and be proud of that, and mention it!

Ok, I better get dressed while sitting working now..

I think it was Brian Aker who got this "How I work" series started and it's a pleasure for me to join in and tell you something about how I work.

Actually, it's only half a month since I've been working for the web development team of MySQL, so some things might still be subject to change. But most things are very likely fixed, so here they are ...

My working PC is an Athlon AMD64 3200+ with 2 GBs RAM and two 250 GB hard drives. Currently it's running SuSE Linux 10.0, preferably with KDE and I'm using the ext3 file system. However, I consider switching over to Fedora not too far from now (maybe in early October, when Fedora Core 6 is released).

Formerly I worked most of the time with Windows, but delegated some server tasks (file server, print server, web server, database server, ...) to Linux - which always used to be SuSE, so I'm still …

I'm looking forward to visiting the FrOSCon Conference in St. Augustin/Germany from 24th to 25th June and to meeting some fellow MySQL Community members and colleagues.

The MySQL related events are:

* MySQL Administration - Backup and Security Strategies on Linux by Lenz Grimmer

* MySQL Cluster: an introduction - A journey into High Availability by Geert Vanderkelen

* Pivot tables in MySQL 5 - creating cross tabulations with MySQL 5 stored routines by Giuseppe Maxia

* The MySQL Business Model - Where and How we Thrive by Lenz Grimmer

... and of course there are many more events that are related to MySQL indirectly (like PHP, Java, Typo3, ...).

First of all many thanks to Dean Swift, Carsten Pedersen, Kai Voigt and Kristian Köhntopp for providing me with this example and allowing me to blog about it.

This origins from a stored procedure exercise that a group of students did which ended up in an optimization competition. It's about a table that should be filled with prime numbers - up to a pre-defined bound - by a stored procedure.

So here's the basic solution:

mysql> DELIMITER //
mysql> CREATE DATABASE sieve //
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> USE sieve //
Database changed
mysql> CREATE TABLE sieve (
     ->   id INT PRIMARY KEY
     -> ) // …

This morning I browsed through a training course book (from one of the largest Austrian training providers) and found the description for a SQL course which I think sounds really nice. Translated to English, it says about this:

"You will learn to know dialect independant SQL, which can be used in almost all database systems without major changes - from Oracle via MS SQL Server up to PostgreSQL or MySQL."

I really like the way how they've set the priorities :-).