Greetings!

I’m MySQL’s new Director of Product Management, having been here a whole two months now! It’s a very busy time with eveything that’s going on at the company, but I’ll do my best to post thoughts out here as much as possible.

In case any of you database junkies out there want to know my background, I have lots of years in the DBA trenches with DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, and Sybase. For the last 6 years, I was the VP of product management at Embarcadero Technologies and was busy making database tools there.

Feel free to shoot me any feedback on whatever’s on your MySQL mind.

Robin Schumacher
rschumacher@mysql.com

The 5.0 version of the MySQL Certification Study Guide is now available at amazon.com. I have received quite a few complaints that it wasn’t immediately available on the 26th, so I guess a lot of people are keen to get their hands on it.

It still hasn’t turned up in-stock in the .co.uk or .de shops, but that is hopefully just a matter of time.

On the same subject, we’ve been asked if the 5.0 study guide can be used to study for the 4.1 exams.

The 5.0 Study Guide is very specific to the version 5 exams. For that reason, I would not recommend that you use it for the v. 4.1 exam. Although you may see a phrase here or there to the effect of “this has changed” or “this was introduced in …

Just out of curiosity, and partly prompted by the IDE-poll on mysql.com, I tried to import the mysql-5.0 folder into the "usual suspects" as far as linux-IDEs are concerned:
Continue reading "MySQL and IDEs (import)"

Living in Berlin, the city of cities, has alot of advantages. One of the main advantages is that a lot of smart nice people realize the beauty of Berlin and therefore also live here. Some are even so smart as to live within a mile from my home. This applies to Stefan Hinz for example, who is the co-author of the anxiously awaited "MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide".

So instead of having to wait endlessly until Amazon finally stocks this book, I just had to put on my sandals and take a little stroll over to Stefan to have a nice chat and to pick up a copy of the book!

As I have mentioned I have decided to spend a year on self education. Getting MySQL certified is one of my top priorities for this year. Also I have had MySQL 5 installed on windows and linux for quite sometime now, but I never really got up and played with all the new features. This book looks to be the perfect excuse to finally do so!

I am also hoping …

With the MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide hitting the bookstores, a lot of people are starting to ask

1. When will the exams be available?
2. Wouldn’t it make sense to wait for the 5.0 exams rather than bother with the 4.1 exams now, then upgrading?

The quick answers to these questions are:

1. I don’t know.
2. No.

Of course, things are a little more complex than that.

The MySQL 5.0 exams will be available about a month after the first GA release of MySQL 5.0. We want to review the actual GA release to make sure all questions really do reflect any last-minute changes in the server that may have had to be implemented.

For many people, taking the 4.1 exam now makes a lot of sense. There are a couple of things to keep in mind regarding this:

1. When we say that the exam is …

AUUG just sent out the news that registration for the AUUG Annual Conference 2005 has been opened. The full list of tutorials and sessions is also online.
Dates and location: October 17-21, 2005 — Carlton Crest Hotel, Sydney Australia

MySQL related sessions:

• Tutorial: PHP and MySQL Best Practices (Luke Welling, Hitwise & Laura Thomson, RMIT)
  
• Tutorial: Optimising MySQL (Arjen …

Copy and paste is normally a great idea. It saves time. Who wants to retype things over and over again? Not me. There are times when copy and paste can get you in trouble. This has bit me a few times in the past as well as other people. When this happens it usually causes and “oh shit! CTRL+c” to kill the query. The query gets cancelled on the master but still propagates to the slave. The master will happily continue executing while replication silently stays stopped on the slave.

The solution? Stop writes on the master. It really depends on the situation whether you want reads to continue or not. If not shutdown mysql (this will stop your clients from hanging) If reads can continue a simple flush tables with read lock; will be fine. Once the slave has caught up flush tables on the slave and copy the table to the master. Once the table is in place on the master start mysql or flush tables and unlock tables if you left it running. The …

As a service to the busy, here are SuSE 9.3 RPMs of 5.0.12 a/o 2005-08-30 — use the spec-file to roll your own from the sources. This is a QND build, no warranty given, no responsibility taken.

After 6 months of slaving together on our respective chapters and spending countless hours on the phone and over email, I finally met Jay in person this weekend. He was in Vermont for a family gathering and came to spend two days in Boston. Jay, his fiance Julie, and his twin brother Andrew met us at our place Saturday evening. We hung out with the family for a little bit, took some photos and signed some copies of the book and then headed out for dinner.

We took the train (and shuttle bus) down to the north end and ate at Al Dente. …