Following on from my previous post about tips I have been picking up from the MySQL certification study guide I have another which I think is worth mentioning.

Personally I had never noticed that the MySQL prompt changes in relation to what went before it. How often have you done something similar to the following.

mysql> select * from emps where emp_name = 'john ;
    '> ;
    '> ';
Empty set (0.01 sec)

You type in a select statement only to open a quote but never close it, personally I always stick in another ; before I realise the mistake and terminate the quote and end the statement correctly. But what I didn't realise before reading the study guide (and making me very unobservant) was that the mysql> prompt changes in response to the currently open quote. In the above example this isn't obvious because it just looks like a continuation but in fact the prompt …

Originally this blog started as a reference for people moving from Oracle to MySQL, over the course of the 5 or so months it's been going I have at times moved away from that and on to other topics. I have tended however to keep it technical and avoided commenting on anything related to the business side of MySQL. Since Christmas my MySQL activities have decreased somewhat but over the last few weeks I've been doing more and more, be that attempting to update this blog or work on new content on www.mysqldevelopment.com. One of the things I have decided to do is take the MySQL certification exams, this isn't some great announcement and I'm a little wary of doing so publicly because I don't want to set a time limit on doing so.

Anyway on to the point, I have been developing with databases from the very first day of my IT career, mostly this has been with Oracle but also …

MySQL and Alfresco are putting on a web seminar on March 9 featuring Alfresco co-founder and CTO John Newton.  John was also a co-founder of Documentum and has been doing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) before it even had a fancy acronym.  He's a scary smart individual who really understands how to build and deliver software in this space that not only works well but has an enjoyable, almost Apple-like user interface.  John will be covering background on ECM, scale-out, open source strategies, best practices and case studies.  If you are looking into content management solutions and want to keep costs under control, you won't want to miss this web …

MySQL is looking for a top-notch certification exam writer for authoring MySQL certification exams. You must be a self-starter, able to work effectively and independently in a virtual setting, delivering consistently high-quality questions and answers. This full-time position is available for qualified candidates world-wide.

See http://www.mysql.com/company/jobs/cert-exam-writer.html for details.

More MySQL jobs at http://www.mysql.com/company/jobs/

From a fab idea by Roland Bouman, I just created a new forum Data Modelling and Database Design in the MySQL Forums. An important topic indeed.

Enjoy! And do keep it practical... 3NF is very decent for most purposes.

As I distribute my card, the most common question I run into is "what does MySQL AB do?"

My answer is usually something like "we allow you to store a lot of information and process it efficiently."

But I've been thinking a bit, and perhaps a better quip might be "you know what the Central Intelligence Agency is, right? Well, we are the most popular database system used by the Decentralized Intelligence Agency, as it were."

:)

"Bozo explosion" seems to be buzzing around the blogosphere. Started by Guy Kawasaki, who gave some great tips on avoiding the bozo explosion, many others including Scobleizer and Jeremy have jumped in on it.

I don't work for a really big company that could be suffering from a bozo explosion but was really interested in asking MySQL employees about whether they think MySQL is experiencing a bozo explosion. I think they will come back and say no, but that will give us folks a look inside the company's culture.

My favorite pieces:

1. The two most popular words in your company are ?partner? and ?strategic.? In addition, …

Earlier, I was talking about transferring an OSCommerce store that uses MySQL. Today I was told that the test orders being placed on the store were receiving an error that "This invoice has already been paid."

At first I thought that it may be a bug as the following post suggests:
Paypal: This invoice has already been paid.

But then after a little bit of thinking I realized that this problem was ocurring due to a discrepancy in order numbers. The client had asked me to transfer the store and let them test it for a while before they make the switch. During this testing phase, the "live implementation" of the store was already receiving orders. Therefore when the client tried to place an order …

Today, while browsing around, I came across a post by Jeff, a CNET employee who was wondering about what provides the optimal usage (assuming a server has 16GB of RAM)? To paraphrase his question, would it be better to use a Large RAM disk or have the MySQL live on the hard disks?

So far I haven't used RAM disk for MySQL simply because most of the servers didn't have 16GB of RAM and some of the databases I worked with were quite larger than 16GB.

I assume that using RAM disk would provide a volatile infrastructure but would certainly improve the performance. Gurus are your thoughts? What can be the possible disadvantages of setting up a RAM disk for large databases?

Your thoughts and comments are needed.

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