This month's Linux Magazine development article was written by Mike Kruckenberg and I. It covers aspects of MySQL 5, including stored procedures, views, and triggers. It was actually quite fun writing the article. We chose to use Python and MySQL to build a simple stock-tracking application that takes advantage of openly available web services, some nifty Python packages, and of course, MySQL's newest features.

Mike and I plan on doing a follow up article (if Martin Streicher at Linux Mag will have us do it again!) on the other new features of MySQL 5 sometime soon. Also featured in this month's article is an interview with Mårten Micklos, MySQL's CEO, which I'm very interested in reading. Well, I guess it's off to the bookstore to purchase my own copy...

The final winner in the MySQL 5 Contest is.... Dave Pullin from North Carolina (USA). Dave, like the other winners, helped with MySQL 5 by making a number of good quality bug reports. Thanks very much and congratulations, Dave!

Of course, many more people submitted reports for MySQL 5 also, literally hundreds of users in fact. That's fantastic. It's a pity we can't give you all a prize (no really!) but please know that your efforts are nevertheless very much appreciated!

In terms of the contest, we're left with a decision on the 3 Grand Prize winners. Give us a few days to sort that out. Can't have a contest without some prolonged suspense, eh!

The final winner in the MySQL 5 Contest is.... Dave Pullin from North Carolina (USA). Dave, like the other winners, helped with MySQL 5 by making a number of good quality bug reports. Thanks very much and congratulations, Dave!

Of course, many more people submitted reports for MySQL 5 also, literally hundreds of users in fact. That's fantastic. It's a pity we can't give you all a prize (no really!) but please know that your efforts are nevertheless very much appreciated!

In terms of the contest, we're left with a decision on the 3 Grand Prize winners. Give us a few days to sort that out. Can't have a contest without some prolonged suspense, eh!

I haven't gotten my copy yet, but the December issue of Linux Magazine is focused on MySQL, including an interview with Mårten Mickos and an article by Jay and I on MySQL 5 features. Doesn't take long from the time I submitted the article to get it on the stands.

Our article specifically covers stored procedures, views and triggers, using the three new feature sets to solve a stock-monitoring problem. If you haven't seen or played with the new features in MySQL 5 this is a great chance to see some of them in action. If you're alread on board with version 5 this is a chance to brush up. If you're a 5 expert there's something to be said for seeing just how much Jay can stick in a query to get at a complex set of data. I'm …

I often when reading articles end up where I never started on the web. You can find some amazing things, and of course lose a lot of time. I think it’s about time to document my degrees of separation from time to time.

• Guide to Open Source Software in Government
  Open Source and MySQL @ Work in Applications
  • The One or Zero Open Source Helpdesk and Task Management System
    • Open Source Initiative OSI - The Open Source Definition
      • Open Source Initiative OSI - …

Catching back up on things. MySQL 5.0 went "RTM" at the end of October. Haven't had a lot of chances to play with the new features (been tinkering in SQL Server 2005 land), but there are a lot of new additions.

You can download it here:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html

• Back in the land of small bosoms and pretentious girls. For a good greeting, I got massively sick - flowing nose, sneezing, tearing eyes. Its hard to believe I was born here, and yet I get all these complications everytime I rock up here.
• Oh, and Streamyx, in both my houses, suck. Its so slow in comparison to what I’m used to sitting at home via cable. And look, their QoS is hopeless too. Sigh. Flickr uploads are slow, at best. And I’m supposed to have at least 256/384kbps upload speeds here.
• Spent some time fighting the VPN, and it eventually succumbed. OpenVPN on Linux is a breeze (go Fedora!), but Tunnelblick took a bit more massaging to get working.
• I have also fixed my VoIP, so you can now reach me …

Pictured here is an image of a wireless, battery powered MySQL cluster. Yes, it works. The setup is a 12" PowerBook and 15" PowerBook and a 15" iBook.

Why? Back in the spring (this post has been a long time coming) when I wrote about setting up, running and maintaining a MySQL cluster I didn't have 3 servers readily available. For part of the time I was on vacation in an area with unexpected extremely slow dialup so I started the work locally on my laptop.

Upon returning home there was too much momentum on my laptop to switch over to available servers so I commandeered two other laptops for the cluster. It turned out to be the right thing to do. As I continued working we experienced a power outage at our house. I took the photo to document the cluster running without any power, or any ethernet cables.

I don't recommend this for any serious …

There was some discussion recently in the forums on how to debug your stored procedures and functions in MySQL 5.0. A lot of developers use SELECT statements to echo debugging output from within stored procedures, some use temporary tables and INSERTs to log it. But you can even take one big leap forward and implement a Stored Routine Debugger that supports breakpoints and allows to inspect and even change tables and local variables while your routines are halted. This series of articles shows how to do it using nothing but standard MySQL stored routines.

The Stored Routine Debugger (I'll call it simply srdb or debugger from now on) will use two concurrent connections to the MySQL server: One to run your stored routines as you normally would without using srdb, the other to do the actual debugging work such as activating breakpoints, listing debugging output or inspecting and changing a …

I was asked a few questions by a reporter thru a collegue, here is an extract of the discussion.

1) Based on your initial experience with Oracle Database Express Edition, what are your initial thoughts on the product in terms of meeting developer needs?

Installing Oracle 10g Express Edition was a breeze. (Article). In the past Oracle products have been more difficult to install, however this has gradually improved with the more recent version releases of 8i, 9i and 10g. This easy installation via rpm under Linux, in particular the inclusion of HTMLDB provides an ideal database environment that is functional in just a few minutes. This is an important first step in gaining initial developer support.

With the database installation, the Web Based HTMLDB Interface and a sound amount of developer articles online at the Oracle Technology Network ( …