First day back from the Developers Conference in Sorrento, and the first post to this blog (thought I might just as well get started, I've been thinking about it for a while but always been distracted). Since I've been to Italy before, I knew part of what was waiting: excellent food, terrific coffee, and nice friendly people. What I wasn't prepared for was the intense discussions that were continously going on. The last year, in Prague, it was to a large part just the down-to-earth work of getting the code ready for the 5.0 release; this time, however, the conference was vibrant with ideas for the future and ways to leverage the skills of the people in MySQL to produce even better services.

Before the conference, I was mostly busy with getting the row-based replication in shape for shipping. All it all, I would say that it holds up very well. Since it's a fresh feature, there's (of course) a list of bugs, but these are mostly annoyances like …

MySQL is now offering a brand new course. It?s called ?MySQL 5.0 New Features?. It is designed to teach experience MySQL users about the new features of the latest release. So, if you are using MySQL 4.1 and want to know more about views, stored procedures, triggers and much more, sign up for a class. There will be lots of them in the near future all around the world.

Right now, I?m teaching the very first class in Tokyo at a customer?s site. We have a new format for the new courses that include more material for students to take home and study after the class is over.

Read more about this and other courses at http://www.mysql.com/training/

From time to time, I have found that companies are most interested in asking me the following questions when giving a job interview:

1. Oracle: Is it possible to recover data from cold and hot backups.
2. MySQL: When is it OK to use MyISAM table type?
3. When should one use InnoDB table type?
4. Linux: How can you find the exit status code of a program
5. Linux: What does the output of ipcs show?
6. What are the different MySQL table types? Comment on each one. [Also see: MySQL …

The MySQL Phrasebook, by Zak Greant and Chris Newman is now available from Amazon. Book Description: "The MySQL Phrasebook is a pocket guide that is jam-packed with useful and essential code "phrases" for the MySQL developer's everyday use. Packed with pr

Today I uploaded a batch of pictures into my gallery and I also re-arranged a number of albums into a separate Conferences and Events collection. The latest additions in there (yes, some should have been uploaded some time ago already!):

• EuroOSCON 2005 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Open Source Database Conference 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany
• FOSDEM 2006 Conference in Brussels, Belgium
• MySQL Developer Meeting 2006 in Sorrento, Italy …

MySQL AB today announced it has joined the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In Provider. The company plans to contribute work to the Eclipse Data Tools Platform project and collaborate with Zend Technologies and others on the Eclipse PHP IDE project. The announcement was made in advance of the EclipseCon 2006 conference, being held in Santa Clara, California this week.

nipple chips and other such python fun.