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 :-).

ActiveGrid CEO Peter Yared is back again -- this time with some analysis of different types of big company reactions to open source.

Open source has definitely challenged the business models of existing infrastructure software players. Following is an ontology of different types of big company reactions to open source, and an example of each type of behavior pattern.

Join the Party - IBM
"Join the Party" open source players contribute extensively to existing open source projects, even those that are competing with their proprietary products. IBM has regularly made major contributions to open source technologies that compete with their own products. Examples include IBM's support of Linux, which competes with their AIX UNIX operating system, and Geronimo and PHP, which compete with its WebSphere business. IBM is clearly the most sophisticated large player in the open …

I now work for MySQL full time without the strings. I've learnt a lot, It really has been the best job I've ever had.

MySQL officially announced release 5.0.22 today (the release notes in the manual were not yet updated to reflect this at the time of writing, they might be when you read this). It's a security fix release only, based on the previous 5.0.21 release. So be careful if you're currently running a preview release of what was tagged 5.0.22 before, this has now become 5.0.23. So you will lose some of the functionality or bug fixes by switching from a 5.0.22 preview to the final 5.0.22 release (it's not an update but sort of a crossdate).

The right way of handling the situation therefore is:

• If you're currently running 5.0.21: Update to 5.0.22 to get the security fix for the SQL-injection hole in the multibyte encoding processing.
• If you're currently running a 5.0.22 preview …

OK, so I am a late adopter. Flickr is a great place that any photographer should be aware of. And not just be aware of, but posting in.

So it shouldn’t be a big surprise to me that half of PlanetMySQL.org bloggers have Flickr accounts. After posting my initial photo sets I registered my first few contacts. By looking at my contacts’ contacts, you’ll likely find most any photographically active MySQL blogger.

There’s a lot to learn and to use (what’s the difference between a friend and a contact? does it matter? will friends merely labelled as contacts be …

I had a nice dinner with Monty Widenius, co-founder of MySQL the other night.  Monty is an excellent cook and he prepared a nice meal for the team that has been working at his house in Finland the past few days.  It was nice to spend time with everyone and drill into some of the interesting new development that's taking place.  We also talked about ways we can improve our processes, code quality, QA and cooking.  I recorded some of the discussions and will try to transcribe it into an interview on the developer zone. 

Update: The interview is now posted.

• MySQL: …

Don't forget to register for ApacheCon Europe before June 6 to receive the early bird discount. This is also when the conference organizers decide which tutorials to keep, so don't wait until the last minute to sign up for your favorites, else you might be disappointed to find out that they're no longer available.

The discounts are pretty good - 349 euros for a full-day of tutorials. (309 if you send three or more people.) Speaking of tutorials, there are some good ones to choose from, and OmniTI is well represented:

• Monday, Advanced Production Troubleshooting Techniques by Theo Schlossnagle …