Conference season is pretty much done for 2005, but here are the few shows you should definitely plan to attend in 2006. Why attend conferences? I find they're the best places to meet up with the relevant people in one's industry, and to get a sense for where an industry is going. I wouldn't miss these mentioned below.

• Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) San Francisco. February 14-15, 2006. San Francisco, CA. The place to discover emerging open source companies and business strategies (Vendor, IT, legal, venture capital). The theme? "The Rise of the Enterprise Communal Application." OSBC San Francisco 2006 will focus heavily on the rise of enterprise open source applications and how to build communities to drive them (and open source projects generally).
  
  
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OK, it's been nearly 2 weeks since the last item on stored procedures, so sorry to those who had been following along, I'm sure by this point you will have gone elsewhere for your Stored Procedure fix, but I'll pickup where I stopped with Part 3.

Today we will be looking at selecting records within a stored procedure. I'm sure if you looking at MySQL 5.0.13 you may have been using MySQL 4 for sometime or at least have some experince of writing SQL statements with other database technologies. Therefore I'll assume you know what one looks like and how to construct one using your database tables.

I'll be using a table called emps in this example..

mysql> desc emps;
+----------+---------------+------+-----+---------+
| Field    | Type          | Null | Key | Default |
+----------+---------------+------+-----+---------+
| emp_id   | int(11)       | NO   | PRI |         |
| emp_name | …

I’m currently working on documentation for a new MySQL 5.1 feature; pluggable storage engines.

As you may know, MySQL is pretty unique in that it offers the user a variety of storage engines that can be used to store data in specialized ways. Until 5.1, most MySQL users made do with the storage engines provided by MySQL AB, though a certain number of larger shops would implement their own storage engine either to add compatability for legacy systems or to meet their own specialized needs.

The reason that most users did not create their own storage engine came down to complexity: adding a storage engine required not only the coding of the storage engine, but the modification of several files in the MySQL server source. This means that you would not be able to use official binaries in the future but would instead have to build MySQL from source with each new release.

With pluggable storage engines, users will be able to …

I installed OOo 2 today. And I connected it to my locally running MySQL database via JDBC. I've been learning a lot about JDBC recently, what with a rash of customers wanting to know how to connect to MaxDB via Java.

I'm also working a bit with Peter Harvey and learning something about ODBC. It seems somewhat more complicated. Perhaps that's because it doesn't have a virtual machine to target. I don't know. They all seem similar to DBI.

I also installed the beta version of Thunderbird. The Debian package was a bit out of date and didn't have index-by-recipient. It was a major hassle for me, so I fixed it.

Ulf and I have been working with a potential customer who has been having issues connecting to his x_server with MaxDB SQL Studio. He was initially reporting that he could not issue a particular query. I tried to get it working locally and put together a little script to build his example database, given …

Matt Asay and the OSBC team put on a great conference in Boston the last two days.  I was skeptical that there would be enough people to warrant an east coast venue, but there were more than 400 people including a range of new emerging technology companies, investors, CIOs and IP lawyers.  (Unabashed lawyer joke: Remember, every healthy ecosystem has parasites!) 

There were three parallel tracks during most of the time (Emerging Trends, IT Executive, Intellectual Property) so it was sometimes tough chosing which sessions to attend.  There were also lots of impromptu meetings with various MySQL partners like Alfresco, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Pentaho, Intel, JBoss, Zimbra, Zend and others and sometimes that got in the way of a session I really wanted to attend.  And it probably would have been rude to leave the panel I was moderating in order to check out the email session on the CIO track. 

Thanks to all …

The slow query log can be a great tool for diagnosing and fixing slow queries. It can also slow the server to a crawl if you are doing bulk inserting. MySQL isn’t afraid to write any query to the slow query log. Even ones that are hundreds of megs. If you are using the multiple-row insert syntax and a query takes longer than long_query_time when it completes mysql will write the entire query out to the slow query log effectively doubling the ammount of data written to the disk.

Alright, I'm all packed - I think. My wife graciously lent me her iPod nano, even... Flying Singapore Airlines to Frankfurt, via Singapore. Should be comfortable, and Singapore Changi is a nice airport. Showers, beds, comfortable seats... exactly what one needs on a long trip! Yea I'm used to it now, I do at least a few such trips a year to either Europe or the US. Still...

Where am I heading now? Open Source Database Conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
Kaj will be there, Brian, and quite a few others including many of our European support people. Do come and meet us!

What an honour: Only hours after publishing my blog entry on dynamic crosstabs in MySQL I got an email from Giuseppe Maxia, the Wizard himself.

But not only did the Wizard send me a "Nice shot!" in his mail, Roland Bouman also said "Thank you guys, I learnt a lot from those!" commenting on our articles. That's actually exactly what I'd have to say to both of them myself.

Giuseppe Maxia, being the real Wizard, pointed out in his mail "that you don't need temporary tables to get the column values, but everything can be achieved with normal SQL (albeit …