In a comment to my posting on MySQL 5.0 getting bug free, Lukas Smith wants MySQL to promote PDO.

I had a chat with Georg Richter about this. He tells me he is working on a PDBC (”JDBC for PHP”) specification and prototype which allows people

a) to write database independent programs
b) to migrate easily from or to other applications (e.g. Java)
c) write powerful applications
d) to reuse existing code written in Java or C++.

Georg’s goal for the upcoming OSDBCON (and PHP Conference) is to find some people from other OS DB projects which like the idea and would like to contribute to PDBC.

So, if you want to be involved in PDBC, talk to Georg at the OS DB Conference 8-9 November 2005 in Frankfurt (where I will also give …

It’s been a long time coming but the wait is nearly over (and well worth it). If you haven’t been following MySQL 5.0 development very closely, the MySQL 5.0 Release Candidate has the following major new features:

• Views (both read-only and updatable views)
• Stored Procedures and Stored Functions
• Triggers
• Server-side cursors (read-only, non-scrolling)
• Precision math
• Larger VARCHARS (up to 64kb)
• ARCHIVE storage engine
• FEDERATED storage engine

I could write a lot more about several of those and may do so at some point. If you've been waiting for any of those features, give 5.0 a try. They're looking to get all of those last minute bugs squashed ASAP.

More details available in …

MySQL 5.0 RC is out. It’s so exciting for me to say that because waiting 3 years for MySQL 5 and finally we have an RC. Wow. I wonder when the prod version will be out. They better release it soon.

In response to MySQL's call to arms (or should that be call to keyboards) with regard to MySQL 5.0 going to the RC stage, over the next few days I'll be giving you a brief introduction to Stored Procedures within MySQL. Hopefully this should give you enough of a heads up to start seriously testing this new aspect of MySQL.

Stage one of course is to download and install the lastest version of MySQL, that's currently 5.0.13 and is available here http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html

OK, once you're all installed let's start up a MySQL command line session and select a database to develop against. Let's keep it really simple to start with, I won't go into too much detail during these tutorials, if you need more info I'll point you in the right direction at the end.

To start we will use the ubiquitous HelloWorld program to …

A while ago I implemented native prepared statements into the MDB2 mysqli driver. However I was never able to get LOB support to work in the execute method. I almost forget about this and only stumbled over this issue again while testing a new portability fetch mode that fixes the issue of sqlite returning table qualifiers in associative fetches unlike most other DBMS extensions in PHP. Maybe someone has experience here and/or is motivated to fix the problem.

FYI: I also added the ability to specify if the array keys in associative fetches should be lowercased (default) or uppercased via the "field_case" option (set it to CASE_LOWER or CASE_UPPER). Previously only lowercasing was supported. Technically I should probably even make uppercased the default, …

Yes indeedy, one of the coolest jobs at MySQL AB is up for grabs... well, you can't just grab it, we're really picky. You have to be of the pretty cool -know where your towel is- kind.

Kaj and I are looking for an extra Community Relations person, based in North America. You'll be doing a fair bit of travelling, please don't underestimate that aspect so make sure your partner or family is ok with that. Take a peek at the ad to see exactly what we're asking for, and be sure to address those topics in your application. I don't want to see just bland resumes! You'll want to show you want this job, and why.... if you can't, you're the wrong person ;-)

Ok, if you don't read Swedish, you might be wondering what the headline above means.  It's a rough translation of "We kill bugs dead" which I used in a presentation to our developers a few months back in Prague.  Since then, it's become somewhat of a mantra in the Engineering team, who are relentless in killing all the bugs they can find.  Which is exactly what we wanted in our MySQL 5.0 release candidate, announced today.  MySQL 5.0 RC has no known showstopper bugs (e.g. Priority 1 or 2 bugs) and no reported bugs from our Beta testers. 

I'm sure there are still a few weird corner cases lurking here or there, but it's solid enough for production use at this stage and we're encouraging folks to take it out for serious usage.  In fact, we'll be giving away prizes for the …

MySQL 5.0 is now in the RC stage... if you haven't looked at 5.0 before, now's really the time to get cooking!

And yep, by getting actively involved you can win one of those fabulously cool and tiny iPod nano gizmos, and even free passes to the next MySQL Users Conference in 2006.

Why push it? Because software, unlike wine, does not mature by having it lie on the shelf. The more people test it in their particular environment (even if development only) the better. That means you! As the dev zone front page says: You Make MySQL 5.0 Rock!

See the MySQL Developer Zone for lots of detail on 5.0 features and the contest.