Hello world,

This is a good week to start blogging. MySQL 5.0 is more bug free than ever, we’ve just posted our Call for Participation for the MySQL Users Conference 2006, and I exceeded my 2005 running quota by hitting over 500 km and a new PR on my standard 13 km run.

Besides, last week, my appointment to “Vice President, Community Relations” at MySQL AB was finalised. It won’t be until October before we’ll make an official Press Release about this, but information usually moves more freely through the community and over blogs, anyway.

Being appointed to VP Community Relations at a company with an installed base of over 6 million, and with a user community without …

Portraits of Ireland Ltd is a web based Irish company aiming to help connect the diaspora to people and places in Ireland through Art. This startup company required an online interactive atlas to assist both artists and those commissioning their work to find not only the island's more well known locations but also its remote and smaller place locations. To this end an Artist Atlas was created. Some of the primary requirements were a cartographically rich, atheistically pleasing vector based system, fully searchable, and with as extensive a database as possible.

A new introductory text released discussing how to index queries for joins. Covers basic theory on how MySQL joins tables and how to identify what needs to be indexed for a join. -- I would appreciate any feedback on technical accuracy and clarity of presentation.

Earlier this week in New York, Sun launched a new line of Opteron powered machines designed by co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim who returned to the company about 18 months ago.  Great performance, great price and they run cooler on less power than competitor's Intel based boxes.  Plus they actually got Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and MySQL to support them!  What's not to like?  They're perfect for scaling out large applications using MySQL 5.0.  And there's more horsepower to come from what the Sun folks tell me.  Sun is certainly keeping everyone on their toes these days!

• TechWorld: New Servers Critical to Company says McNealy
• …

At XAMPP BETA you can download the new beta version of the next XAMPP for Linux release. New in this version: Up-to-date versions of MySQL (4.1.14) and PHP (5.0.5), and for the first time: FPDF (1.53) and PostgeSQL support for PHP.

XAMPP BETA versions are always for testing purposes only. There will be no upgrade packages from and to beta versions. To all testers: Many thanks in advance!!

If no fatal problems occur the final release will be in the course of the next week.

I've taken a great deal of interest in version 5 of MySQL, mainly because of my background in procedural extensions for other databases. It's been pretty exciting watching the development of version 5 and as somebody who has been keen to exploit the features I've been running as current a version as possible (it's currently at 5.0.12), this has meant at times a bi-weekly installation of the latest version.

One of the biggest requests from people on the stored procedures forum over on the MySQL website has been for information on using prepared statements, I'll gloss over the fact that for 90% of these situations prepared statements are not the way to go. MySQL Stored Procedures did infact support prepared statements for a while but this support was removed in version 5.0.9, this caused all manner of confusion and fist waving by the masses and resulted in a flood of angry forum entires asking where they had gone and why MySQL had pulled …

At XAMPP BETA you can download the new beta version of the next XAMPP for Linux release. New in this version: Up-to-date versions of MySQL (4.1.14) and PHP (5.0.5), and for the first time: FPDF (1.53) and PostgeSQL support for PHP.

XAMPP BETA versions are always for testing purposes only. There will be no upgrade packages from and to beta versions. To all testers: Many thanks in advance!!

If no fatal problems occur the final release will be in the course of the next week.

I see this question asked in #mysql a lot, so I’m just making a post here.
Scenario: You have user a, that needs to be able to create and drop databases at will, but you don’t want to give him full root access.

Solution: Use the GRANT statement, to create a user with full access to a limited set of databases.

GRANT ALL ON `usera_%`.* TO usera@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ’somepassword’ WITH GRANT OPTION;

What this does, is allow usera, to create databases that follow the usera_foo naming convention. This way, you can see all the databases he’s created/dropped etc, and he’s a happy power user.

PHP remains the most popular language for MySQL users.  Not only is it used for scripting web applications, it's used in a broad range of very scalable enterprise applications, content systems, interactive applications and more.  Zend is one of the leading companies in this space founded by PHP 4 co-authors Zeev Suraski and Andi Guttmans.  They're going to be celebrating 10 years of PHP at the Zend PHP 05 conference in the bay area October 17-21.  There are quite a few good keynotes and presentations there including one by JD Duncan, ace MySQL consultant, who will showcase some pretty interesting work done at CNet using MySQL and PHP together.  This promises to be a great conference and I …