OK, don't beat me up for talking about the UC again, but this is some cool stuff!

The Community team has been hard at work inviting open source foundations, organizations, and projects to the DotOrg pavilion at this year's MySQL Users Conference, and it looks like we're going to have a number of really interesting and key projects setting up shop at the Pavilion.

Jay, what the heck is the DotOrg Pavilion?

Hmmm, glad you asked. If any of you have attended other open source conferences, you've probably heard the term .ORG pavilion, or something similar, before. It's a place where non-commercial entities, projects, and key organizations and foundations involved in our beloved FOSS community get a chance to discuss the issues on top of their agendas and showcase key developments in their projects. As conference attendees, you should plan on spending time in the pavilion. Why?

Well, OK, what other time will you get …

The new MySQL 5.1.7 XML functions let you manipulate XML-formatted text strings using XPath query expressions.

You've got string ExtractValue(XML, XPath) - this let's you query a (sub)fragment of the XML fragment and returns the text content of the node that was found (if multiple nodes apply, the text contents of all these nodes are concatenated and separated by a space character, which is then returned). And, you've got XML UpdateXML(XML, XPath, XML) - this let's you search XML fragments and allows you to replace them with another XML fragment.

The funny thing is, it looks as though the XPath query is handled very differently in either case. Consider this little snippet (you might wan't …

Spotted via Google News: Ellison: Open source needs big vendors to thrive

That's ok, Larry! That's why we eat healthy, partner with for instance HP and Dell, and grow pretty darn fast ourselves, too. With no intention of stopping.
Since I joined the company in 2001, we've doubled our employee count and revenue pretty much every year. For a "normal" company, that would be a very scary growth rate. For MySQL AB it is "interesting" too, but it's working.

Larry also says:
"Are we interested? It's a tiny company. I think the revenues from MySQL are between US$30 million and US$40 million. Oracle's revenue next year is US$15 billion."Our business model yields happy customers, while your bottom line makes customers squirm and try to escape at every opportunity - particularly when the billing method …

I’ve been working on an updated article on Normalization, click the read more link and tell me what you think.

(the formatting is horrid thanks to Wordpress, please ignore and pay attention to the content, thanks

An Introduction to Database Normalization

Table of Contents

Introduction

Mike’s Bookstore

First Normal Form

Defining Relationships

Second Normal Form

Third Normal Form

Joining Tables

Conclusion

Resources

Introduction

Over the years I, like many of you, have had the experience of taking over responsibility for an existing …

I sat the MySQL Core Exam in November, and I'm happy to report that I passed!

Last month came time to sit the pro exam, and not feeling as confident after what was quite a tough core sitting, I thought it was time for some study. While some things might appear obvious to some, I thought I'd share the notes I took when I was reading it:

• Enums and sets can be set by their 'bit' value or actual value.
• <=> is the null safe equivalent to =
• MyISAM provides no data caches (except query cache). It relies on the host OS to provide it.
• InnoDB can use a raw partition for its tablespace
• There is a general log file which can store all queries (as well as of course binary log & slow query)
• Temporary tables can be named the same as non-temporary tables, with the temporary taking precedence (could open possibilities)

I'm largely self taught, so having …

Here's one more that I stumbled over:

Five reasons why you should never use PostgreSQL -- ever

As the title suggests, it's mainly about PostgreSQL. However, a lot of it applies to MySQL, as well.

I just stumbled over a new book from Apress:

JDBC Metadata, MySQL, and Oracle Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

Could be interesting for some folks ;-).

Dave Winer is one of the pioneers of the software industry. He singlehandedly developed and popularized outliners as a software category and later helped develop XML-RPC, SOAP and RSS. 

There's a good interview on NerdTV where Robert X. Cringely interviews Winer and discusses topics such as outlining, the early days of the software industry, why programmers don't always get it, the development and evolution of OSS, publishing on the internet and more.  Dave's not known for being a shrinking violet; he has strong views on a lot of technologies.  But love him or hate him, he's had huge impact on software in the last ten years.

• NerdTV: …

While at the MySQL developers meeting in Sorrento, Italy, we are getting the chance to take the MySQL 5.0 certification exams, which are currently in beta. We are proud that we make the exams fair but very challenging - it will be interesting to see if any of the developers who helped write MySQL 5.0 fail the exam! I’m glad that MySQL makes these exams available to internal developers, as it would otherwise be far to easy to focus on your own particular area of specialization. Studying for the exam is a good reminder of the different ways that it is possible to use MySQL.

The beta exams are also available to the public, and while the exams are in beta you get the benefit of extra time.

In Serving Images from a Database, Sheeri responded to me: I appreciate your ideas, but you haven't read what I've written: "the sheer number of files is enough to kill any os."

I'm serious about that. we're talking 36 million images -- that's 36 million files (no thumbnails, they're all reduced size) plus directories to store them in. We have cacheing tuned very well, and it's still kills the OS.

Here is what I tried to simulate that:

I took my new Strato MR2. It is currently running tor, INN and MySQL. There are two HDS722516VLSA80 160 GB SATA HDDs. These disks are rated at 8.8ms avg seek time, so there are 113 seeks …