I know, there have been some problems with db4free.net during the week that I attended the MySQL Users Conference. Unfortunately, I didn't have a laptop with me and had no access to the Internet most of the time. I could find out on Tuesday (thanks to Sheeri who borrowed me her laptop!) that the MySQL 5.0 server was down and managed to start it up again. When I returned home Saturday evening, the MySQL 5.0 server was down again. Strangely enough, the MySQL 5.1.10 server which was built from the development source, seemed to work great all week long.

Today I have updated the MySQL 5.0 server to 5.0.21 and installed the lately released MySQL 5.1.9 server instead of the 5.1.10 development snapshot. I hope that the problems are solved now, but I'm back online now to keep an eye on the …

Thanks to everyone who's been involved in rewarding me with the MySQL Community Award "Writer of the Year 2006" and congratulations to my co-winners Giuseppe Maxia, Roland Bouman and Rasmus Lerdorf!

Here's that great prize (sorry for the quality and all the shades - I'm not a good photographer):



So many people have Oscars, Grammies and things like that on their chimneys - but how many have such a great trophy ;-)?

I've added another free article to my growing collection:

• Guru Speak: Storing Sessions in a Database

This article creates the necessary functions in steps, so that you hopefully better understand the final product and can make your own modifications to better suit your needs. If you're just interested in the code, you can look in the code repository for Essential PHP Security:

• Store Session Data in a MySQL Database

You might also be interested in Trick-Out Your Session Handler, an article by …

Hey, this was an incredible week and it's hard to believe that it's over! Sorry that you didn't hear or read from me during this week (except of course the people who attended the Conference), but I was (with a few exceptions, thanks to Sheeri and Roland) offline this week and could not post any new articles in that time.

Every individual day was absolutely incredible. The trip was alright, it was my first big journey alone and I was concerned about many things that could possibly go wrong - from how to find my way through the airports (my route was Vienna - London - San Francisco), or since I rented a car, driving in a different country with some different rules and things like that. But it all worked very smoothly and there were no such problems at all ... and I gained a lot of new experiences about travelling. The flights …

Coming away from the MySQL Users Conference I have a short list of questions and/or ideas to research over the next few weeks.

The first is a question posed by an individual after the session on backups. She had been told that mysqldump works good for small installations but once you get above a gigabyte of data it can't handle the dump or restore process.

I've been using mysqlhotcopy for a few years now, but before that was using mysqldump on a few fairly large databases. At the time we switched over to mysqlhotcopy I think our system was around 20 gigs of data, and although the backup/restore process took a good chunk of …

Travelling on from Vancouver, I'll be visiting the Seattle MySQL UG meetup on Monday, and the Chicago MySQL UG one on Wednesday. So if you want to catch me on my "world tour" and are in one of the above places, this is your chance ;-)

Julian Cash stopped by the MySQL User Conference and took a bunch of neat photos. Here are some of the best ones.

I spend the past week in florida. First visiting my parents and then spending time at php|tek where I was invited to give two talks. I was quite nervous about the first talk about "database schema deployment". My original intention was to create a working solution to handle scripting the necessary DDL and DML statements to manage schema updates. However while researching the topic I found that its even less trivial than I expected. So during my talk I was mainly giving some basic ideas along with a number of ideas to explore depending on the needs. For example if all you care about is generating DDL then things are quite simple. In the past MySQL indirectly benefited from the simplicity of the database but with foreign keys, views, stored procedures and triggers even generating DDL is not entirely …

Another one of the sessions at the MySQL Users Conference I attended was Tuning MySQL5 SQL and Stored Procedures by Guy Harrison from Quest Software. A global company with 6000+ customers.

Guy has written a number of Oracle Performance Books in the past. His work now is on the “Spotlight” product family - Database diagnositic tools converting data to graphical representations. For these products, MySQL 5 and InnoDB only is necessary, simply due to accessing the right internal information for presentation. There are Freeware MySQL product downloads.

In this presentation he stated, nothing he was talking about specifically was relatively new. He did make quite a funny comment, “He is now seeking refugee status in the MySQL …