Conference time! While I understand Frank’s feelings, there’s always hope that there will be some great “blog reports”, amazing IRC, and if at all, some form of podcasts.

However, if I was going to the MySQL Users Conference 2006, I’d probably attend things in this order:

• Monday - Arjen’s Optimizing MySQL Applications Using the Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture because this is important stuff all folk should learn about. Performance being the name of the game these days, it’d be silly to miss MySQL Performance Optimization that our very own performance guru, Peter …

... on MySQL, of course. Mark Matthews, creator of the JDBC interface for MySQL (Connector/J) and all round Java guru, will be teaching this tutorial. If you use J2EE with MySQL, you'll want to be there. I know, it's a tough choice between this and some of the other tutorials... arrange for a colleague to be at another one! ;-)

As I mentioned earlier, we expect many of the tutorials to sell out. I see some going very fast (I get weekly reports). If you really want to be in, you probably don't want to wait with registering.
…

Hey, look! LinuxQuestions.org did a poll and it turns out that lots of GNU/Linux users like MySQL :)

http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=30709&src=site-marq

The question was asked if one could create a million tables in a MySQL database. So I put together a small php script to do just that. It ran all afternoon, all evening, and into the night. It hung during the creation of the 262,731st table. I was running Windows Server 2003, using the NTFS file system on a mirrored volume. Each table was an InnoDB table with a single tinyint field and no indexes. The ibdata1 file grew by more than 3GB during the process although no rows were ever inserterd. Windows file compression is enabled, however and the 4.4GB ibdata1 file actually occupies only 295 MB.

I posted back to the fellow after my script had run for several minutes my calculation that it would take about 27 hours just to create the tables and he might want to rethink his design. I never heard back from him.

Recently another forum post asked a question in a similar vein, about creating "more than a couple thousand" …

As you may or may not know I'm a sysop over at the Quest Pipelines MySQL forum. We don't get a great deal of visitors in the MySQL forums there, due in part I guess to the fact the forums on the MySQL website are so good.

However in addition to running the forums Quest produce a monthly database newsletter which is sent to over 28,000 database professionals. Subjects vary but the general format is an article on Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and for the last year or so MySQL. For me this is a great way to spread the MySQL word to other database users but unfortunately I'm insanely busy with the day job so I can't submit anything this month.

So if you have something written or would like to contribute then let the newsletter team know at

newsletter@quest-pipelines.com

Or have a look at the latest addition over at the MySQL area of the pipelines site.

…

Way to go! Almost 63% of voters chose MySQL as the Database of the Year over at LinuxQuestions.org.

Here's to another great year for MySQL and continuing success.

On January 16, the European Commission (EC) announced a consultation on the future of the European patent system. An SAP official has already said that “it’s starting again”, meaning that this is the next round of the European software patent debate!

Companies, organizations and individuals who would like to tell the EU their opinion on what its patent policy should look like have until the end of this month to answer the EC’s questionnaire. But in order to do so, one has to wade through hundreds of pages of legislative proposals and related documentation. That’s why I wrote up a position paper that everyone can use to make his or her contribution and write to the EC:
www.no-lobbyists-as-such.com/PATSTRATpositionpaper.pdf …

MySQL versions 4.1 and below use imprecise math in operations with DECIMAL data, which is supposed to be precise (that’s the whole point). There is no real solution to the problem, though there are workarounds. There is also at least one genuine bug in MySQL related to this problem. In this article I’ll explain the problems, demonstrate them in action, and show you how to work around them. The problem Many fractional values cannot be represented exactly as a floating-point number in computers.

You may wish to take a peek at TurboDbAdmin.

I personally really like phpMyAdmin and I reckon that Marc Delisle and his gang are doing a fantastic job, but... you can do some nifty things with AJAX, and it's not just eyecandy (What is AJAX?).

I understand there's also an web/AJAX version of the MySQL command-line client in the works somewhere... that could be useful for demonstrations, training, online exercises... it's fine to use GUI tools, but I do feel it's important to know the SQL commands that hide behind it. And sometimes the command-line is the only tool you have available, so it's a good skill to have.

14:34 < MThomas> Time to install and configure Sync Manager in development
                 environment: 4 days, one of which was 15 hours long.  Time to
                 install and configure in production: 30 minutes.

I’ve written a bit of documentation that might help you get things running in the same way:

• http://wiki.colliertech.org/index.php/MaxDB:Installation
• http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/syncman/part1.html
• Create a Synchronization Scenario

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