If you’ve worked with any of the commerical databases other than MySQL, you may have already had some experience with triggers.

I’m glad that the MySQL developers finally managed to squeeze in this extremely important feature. I no longer dread trying to defend MySQL from the Microsoft and Oracle developers who have had triggers for so many years.

I’ll use the example off the MySQL website (explained below in detail). I’ll assume you know how to create a table. If not, please read up on that first.

CREATE TABLE test1(a1 INT);
CREATE TABLE test2(a2 INT);
CREATE TABLE …

Well, database operations are bread-and-butter work for most PHP applications. PHP and MySQL, for example, have been like brother and sister for many years. You may have heard about "SQL injections", a bad taste from the outside world of $_GET, $_POST, $_COOKIE and the like.

Everybody should know that you shouldn't pass variables from outside unfiltered to i.e. mysql_query. Of course, sometimes this can slip through because we are human and humans make errors. The initial development of Chorizo! was driven by our own need to make it easier for our developers to detect potential security issues and fix them in a second. With Morcilla, our server-side PHP extension, life will be much easier, especially when you turn display_errors = Off in your php.ini settings which won't give a hint to potential attackers that a modified GET variable produced a SQL error. With Morcilla, we look inside the server and can detect SQL injection …

Near the end of a two weeks vacation in southern Italy, I combined pleasure and business and took the 4 to 5 upgrade exams, which I passed, to achieve both MySQL 5 DBA and Developer certifications.
I took both exams today in Palermo, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Now I am back to full-time tourist for a few more days.

Recently, MySQL Cluster developer and team leader Martin Sköld committed some major revisions and additions in the storage/ndb/ndbapi-examples directory of the MySQL 5.1 source. Although I don’t think these have yet been pushed out to the public 5.1 tree, I went ahead late last week and added them to the Practical Examples section of the NDB API Guide so that interested parties can take advantage of a number of corrections and other improvelements that Martin’s made.

There’s two new additions, also — here and here — these demonstrate for the first time in the Guide the use of the API with multiple clusters. You might find these particularly useful if …

Sheeri talked a little about MySQL Triggers in One TRIGGER Fact, Optimizer Rewriting Stuff. While it’s great that MySQL 5.0 has Triggers, there are some things that I feel could become features in future releases.

IF EXISTS

One of the beautiful features that MySQL has is IF EXISTS. This ternary operation that if the object exists performs the operation, of not it does nothing works wonders in reviewing logs for errors. One of the problems with Oracle for example, is the requirement to ignore the ORA errors for non-existent objects.

But this functionality doesn’t exist for Triggers? One must wonder why. I’d like to see this.

mysql> DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS trigger_name;

MySQL Manual DROP …

Sheeri talked a little about MySQL Triggers in One TRIGGER Fact, Optimizer Rewriting Stuff . While it’s great that MySQL 5.0 has Triggers, there are some things that I feel could become features in future releases.

Tandem-Forum has signed an agreement with MySQL AB to become an Authorized MySQL Training Center (AMEC) and will immediately begin to offer MySQL 5.0 training in Moscow, Russia.

New review up at http://www.openwin.org/mike/index.php/books/mysql-phrasebook/.

Short version: I like it.