Looks like Jay and I will be presenting at the 2006 MySQL User's Conference in Santa Clara in April. Vee (from O'Reilly) just sent the notification this evening that our proposal was accepted. This news is exciting, foremost because it means that I'll be attending the conference. Oh, I've been there for the past two years but there's never a gaurantee that I'll get to return unless I'm on the program to present. Secondly that I'll get a chance to hang out with Jay, who I've only met once in person after many months of virtual slavery writing Pro MySQL.

Now that I say that, if the community team isn't already thinking about this, I think it would be cool to have a "Meet Planet MySQL" function where contributors and members of the …

I have the base Fedora Core 4 installed with only a couple issues. When I decided to install the new OS and update my software, I figured I might as well upgrade my Hard Drive. I got an Ultra ATA/133 200G drive and replaced my 20G drive. Of course, I didn't read the package and didn't notice I needed a different I/O card. Back to CompUSA to get the new card.

The second little glitch was I downloaded the ISO images and burned them to CD. Except I didn't realized I had to burn them in a specific way. The second time I figured it out and was able to install right off CD.

The particular distribution I used had Firefox 1.0.4 and OpenOffice 1.9 (2.0 beta) so I'm no further ahead in that respect. Since I was planning on re-installing these packages anyway, it's not a big deal. My first task, however, is to get the MySQL 5.0 source and get Apache configured. More updates to come...

Well, it's official. I've been accepted for at least two sessions at the 2006 MySQL User Conference.

Get ready to register and you could be watching:

Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL
The Sakila Sample Database

Which of course means I need to get the Sakila sample DB released *soon* so that I can tweak it before the conference gets too close.

I'm looking forward to this year's conference, every year is bigger and better than the last.

In case you haven't heard, Linus Torvalds had a bit of a rant at the GNOME developers regarding quality user interfaces. In the course of the exchange, certain nasty words and comments were thrown about — to put it nicely.

Now, I'm by no means a saint, and every once in a while I might get my knickers in a twist about something or other, but this kind of behaviour, on both sides of the coin by various folk, does nothing to further the FOSS movement. In fact, it deeply hurts it. Why? Well, for one thing, the black & white back-and-forth bantering which inevitably follows such outbursts (like this recent well-meaning post that turned into comments about the age-old PostgreSQL/MySQL debate) does little to inspire confidence in …

Getting back to the ranking calculation quiz I posted last week....

I was a bit surprised about all the complicated constructs with counters, stored procedures and even views. The solution actually needs to work on a 4.1 server so I should perhaps have banned using stored procs, but I didn't expect them to be needed - however I understand that people are very excited about MySQL 5 and all its new capabilities ;-)

My own early solution (which I worked out after posting the quiz) was:

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT score) AS ranking
  FROM points
 WHERE score >= (SELECT score FROM points WHERE id=#)

Which is, provided we index the (score) column as well, very fast (the subselect actually gets optimized away into a constant). The server will only have to use the index. It handles ex aequo positions but without skipping …

Getting back to the ranking calculation quiz I posted last week....

I was a bit surprised about all the complicated constructs with counters, stored procedures and even views. The solution actually needs to work on a 4.1 server so I should perhaps have banned using stored procs, but I didn't expect them to be needed - however I understand that people are very excited about MySQL 5 and all its new capabilities ;-)

My own early solution (which I worked out after posting the quiz) was:

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT score) AS ranking
  FROM points
 WHERE score >= (SELECT score FROM points WHERE id=#)

Which is, provided we index the (score) column as well, very fast (the subselect actually gets optimized away into a constant). The server will only have to use the index. It handles ex aequo positions but without skipping …

Finally got an evening to get the video (alternate site) of Monday night's MySQL meetup captured and ripped down to a manageable Quicktime move. The presentation is Philip Antoniades speaking about MySQL 5's new features.

It's really pretty easy with MiniDV and a firewire cable. Used Final Cut to throw in some titles (Creative Commons), fades and tweak the audio a bit. The longest part of the whole process was the export to Quicktime, about 2 hours while I worked on other things.

If you're looking for a dazzling multimedia experience, this isn't for you. The most important thing was to get the audio sounding good, and the ability to see the slides. We may …

Someone spotted this Java/MySQL job in Austin Texas, specifically asking for MySQL 5 expertise:

http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?JobID=37480170&WT.mc_n=MKT000125
In this position you will be assisting a mid size company with their open source database system. Your main responsibility will be developing a database tier in Hibernate and MySQL. Additional responsibilities include assisting with the conversion and update from MySQL 4.0 to MySQL 5.0.

Requirements:

• Must have strong experience with stored procedures and clustering.
  
• Must have experience with MySQL and Hibernate.
  
• Must have an understanding of Java

Someone spotted this Java/MySQL job in Austin Texas, specifically asking for MySQL 5 expertise:

http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?JobID=37480170&WT.mc_n=MKT000125
In this position you will be assisting a mid size company with their open source database system. Your main responsibility will be developing a database tier in Hibernate and MySQL. Additional responsibilities include assisting with the conversion and update from MySQL 4.0 to MySQL 5.0.

Requirements:

• Must have strong experience with stored procedures and clustering.
  
• Must have experience with MySQL and Hibernate.
  
• Must have an understanding of Java