MySQL certification - the experience - MySQL-dump
If you’re thinking about getting certified, this is a good summary of what you should and shouldn’t do. Mostly basic study principles, and I like how he focused on what to do, that will help you with your work, rather than just passing the test.

Richard Florida pens a nice riposte (PDF version) to Thomas Friedman's excellent The World Is Flat. Florida argues, instead, that our world is "spiky." Says Florida:By almost any measure the international economic landscape is not at all flat. On the contrary, our world is amazingly "spiky." In terms of both sheer economic horsepower and cutting-edge innovation, surprisingly few regions truly matter in today's global economy. What's more, the tallest peaks - the cities and regions that drive the world's economy - are growing ever higher, while the valleys mostly languish.Sobering and disquieting, if true.

After working through some measures of "spikiness" (The world's population is clustering into cities; patents [Don't say it, Stephen!] are …

I know the .NET framework is still in it's infancy but there are some parts of it that just make you want to say "what were you guys thinking?".  With this blog entry I start a new series called .NETBF.  If you need help determining what the BF stands for, drop me a line.  I might tell you.  :-)

Today's gem is the socket class.  Let's say you want to write code that will connect to a remote server, timing out after a customizable number of seconds.  Being very well versed in the BeginConnect/EndConnect pair and how they can be used to connect asynchronously to a remote server, this is what you might use.  In fact, this was exactly how our Connector/Net provider implemented ConnectTimeout until I got a bug report from a guy who was trying to connect to 300 servers *simultaneously*.  It seems that after about 25 connections, they all started failing.  Why?

First, you have to understand …

Kristian Köhntopp, our soon-to-be colleague, went through MySQL certification recently. He has done a very nice write-up on his experience here.

Kristian has some very good pointers on how to learn all the stuff you’re expected to know about the MySQL certification exam, and how to ultimately pass the exam.

(No, even I don’t know whether he passed or not yet — I have yet to receive his exam results).

As a service to the busy, here are SuSE 9.3 RPMs of 5.0.13 a/o 2005-09-09 — use the spec-file to roll your own from the sources. This is a QND build, no warranty given, no responsibility taken.

An introduction to the normalisation of databases that requires no prior knowledge and serves as an excuse to introduce cat content into MySQL-dump.

Continue reading "Nermalisation"

This is the MySQL Certification Stude Guide, Version 4.1. It was the foundation of my preparation for the MySQL 4 Core and Pro exams I took at the MySQL Consulting Bootcamp 2005. The test results are not yet in, so I cannot tell you if it worked. :) I complemented my preperations with practical experiments and by simply reading my way through the MySQL Online Manual.

I can tell you about the Guide, and the Test, though.

Continue reading "MySQL certification - the experience"

Although I will join MySQL not before November, 1st, I managed to attend the MySQL Consulting Bootcamp 2005 in Munich. The meeting started last Monday, September, 5th, with all members of the new EMEA consulting team seeing each other for the first time and lasted a week.

My personal blog has Images of the team and Hofbrauhaus Impressions.


Continue reading "MySQL Consulting Bootcamp 2005"

A little over a month ago, I finally finished writing Essential PHP Security, a guide to secure PHP programming that I've been working on in my spare time for quite a while.

I'm really happy with the results. The people at O'Reilly have been great to work with, and I was lucky enough to have some of the best technical reviewers an author could ask for (Adam, David, George, and John). The result is a lean 150 page guide that covers what I feel are the most important topics with which a PHP …

Just wanted to remind people in the Berlin area that there will be a special PHP UG Berlin meeting on september 12th as part of a roadshow. We will have a bunch of guests from Zend, eZ Publish and MySQL doing some very interesting presentations:

1. eZ systems: "Enterprise PHP components by eZ systems": Die eZ publish enterprise components sind der erste Schritt zur Erstellung von komplexen Webapplikationen. Dieser Vortrag stellt die Klassen-Bibliothek vor und zeigt exemplarisch deren Verwendung.
2. MySQL: "Einführung in MySQL 5.0": In diesem Vortrag erhalten Sie einen Überblick über die neuen Funktionen von MySQL 5.0. Erfahren Sie mehr über Stored Procedures, Views, Triggers, XA, Cursors und das Information Schema.
3. Zend: "Zend und die PHP-Community in Deutschland": Offene …