Many MySQL critics have complaint about the lacking of key features, scalability and standards compliance. They also often complain about users who fall for MySQL's successful marketing, short of blaming the inherit evil nature of the universe why such inferior technology is so popular.

While MySQL has been catching up on all of the above mentioned fronts, it cannot be denied that one of its key strength's is its active community. While some will argue that this community was a direct result of giving the masses the features they needed, instead of clobbering them with features that would just overwhelm these often self educated people. Others might simply attribute this to their effective marketing machinery. However even today MySQL attracts new users even though the product has become considerably more complex. This is probably due to its clear dominance as the OSS database of choice. At the same time MySQL is now able to make in roads …

A chunk of another sample chapter from Pro MySQL has made it's way out there. This time it's the first 10 pages of Chapter 5, Storage Engines and Data Types over on DBAZine.

I can't be 100% sure (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but I think MySQL is fairly new to DBAZine. When I first went to look around the site to get an idea of what chapters might fit I couldn't find anything about MySQL anywhere. Conversations with Apress indicated that DBAZine was looking to expand to include some of the open source database offerings. I'm excited that MySQL is the first of the open source databases to get attention.

Stewart has a new toy for his MySQL User Conference presentation, which is probably for the best as I fully intend to ask why MySQL replication is so unreliable, why Innodb hot backup appears to hate me, and lots of other biting questions if I think of them. It does make me wonder what other Aussies are going to be in town for the conference? I have a survey for you to complete:

• My name is: ________________________________
• I am arriving: ________________________________
• I will be staying in: ______________________________ (name of city only please)
• I would be interested in drinking so much I fall off my chair: yes / no (please circle)
• I would like to know where you can get Coopers beer in Silicon Valley: yes / no (please circle)
• Is …

MySQL today announced that Seat Pagine Gialle, one of Europe's leading business directory providers, has selected MySQL Cluster technology to provide maximum uptime and availability to its heavily-trafficked online properties, including Virgilio, Yahoo.it, Yahoo.co.uk, Thomson Local Services, Corriere della Sera, and Supereva.

A few months ago I wrote from Caracas, Venezuela on the importance of infrastructure. I'm on vacation in Costa Rica now with my family, and the same lesson is hitting home.

In software, we're largely coming to take infrastructure for granted, thanks to exceptional middleware from JBoss, databases from PosgreSQL and MySQL, etc. We think, in other words, that 280 (California), I-80 (CA to UT and beyond), I-95 (Massachusetts), M25 (London), and other roads just happen. They're free, like much of our best software. Infrastructure is FREE!!!!

Except that it's not. I drove on pseudo-free infrastructure Sunday as my family and I headed to church in Puntarenas, Costa Rica. The drive is roughly 60 kilometers, and took us 1.5 hours. Why did it take so long? Because try as I might, I couldn't jump our little Toyota over the massive …

Disclaimer:
I have the unfortunate luck of being hired on the same date that Tom Kyte started his blog. Honestly, I've been working on this a couple days so I'm posting it anyway, even if you think I am a copycat.

Six years ago today I started with my current company. This is the longest I've ever had the same title, although my responsibilities have changed over the years. It's also the most time I've spent at the same place.

It was the tail end of the dotCom boom and I had over 40 interviews with companies in the Tri-State area. Most of them didn't pan out, but when it came time to choose, I had three offers to consider. When I accepted this job, I took a chance because I liked the people but didn't think they had enough for me to do. I was the sole DBA for one production database that ran on an Ultra 2 (2 CPUs, 54G of …

Have you ever wondered how to update the status of an order to "Closed" when the whole ordered quantity has been received?
If you are on a database that supports triggers like me (I'm on MySQL 5.0.16 right now) you can have something like:

Table structure:

Orders table

1. DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `test`.`orders`;
2. CREATE TABLE `test`.`orders` (
3. `order_id` int( 10 ) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
4. `order_date` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
5. `order_status` CHAR ( 1 ) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
6. PRIMARY KEY ( `order_id` )
7. ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Order lines table

1. DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `test`.`order_lines`;
2. CREATE TABLE `test`.`order_lines` (
3. `order_id` int( 10 ) UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
…

Whow, seems like next couple of weeks will be extermely busy when looking at conferences, In the next couple of weeks there is the MySQL User Conference, Fisl is about to start and I`m going to miss all of them , them being at the other side of the ocean. I`m making my travel arrangements for LinuxTag where I`ll be helping out in the Grid and Virtualisiation track however. Not sure about my plans for the rest of the year.

Not going to all these conferences means that I`ll have lots more time to get some stuff done, such as upgrading some of my test platforms to a more recent CentOS version so that I don't have to build the MySQL Cluster binaries myselve but just use the ones provides by MySQL :)

As the weather plans on staying bad I`m also planning on more …

Here‘s a snapshot of my view out the office window…Yes, it‘s starting to look like springtime here in Chicago.

That also means it‘s that time of year where I start travelling for conferences. This year is shaping up to be light so far, but of course I will be at the MySQL Users' Conference next week in Santa Clara, CA.

Besides giving a tutorial, and two talks, I'm also looking forward to being part of the Java and MySQL community, hanging out at Gavin's talk about Hibernate and Seam, and participating in the …