Even though MySQL is used to power a lot of web sites and applications that handle large binary objects (BLOBs) like images, videos or audio files, these objects are usually not stored in MySQL tables directly today. The reason for that is that the MySQL Client/Server protocol applies certain restrictions on the size of objects that can be returned and that the overall performance is not acceptable, as the current MySQL storage engines have not really been optimized to properly handle large numbers of BLOBs. To work around these limitations, these projects usually just store a reference to the object (e.g. a path name in a regular file system). This approach works around the limitations applied by the MySQL Server, but results in a disconnection and potential source of inconsistency between the database and the file system content. There was an interesting discussion about that topic on Sheeri's …

In two weeks from now, the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007 will take place in Santa Clara, California. Our team has been very busy with working with the conference management team from O'Reilly to prepare for this event, especially Jay who is in charge of organizing and arranging the more than 110 sessions that will be held in several parallel tracks. The conference program looks very exciting, I am impressed by the wide range of topics and quality of speakers that we have lined up.

In addition to the presentations and tutorials, there will also be an Expo, where partner companies will exhibit their products …

It's time for another Meetup of the Hamburg MySQL User Group! As for previous events, we'll meet on Monday, 2nd of April at 19:00 in the Chinese restaurant Ni Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek.

This time there will be a presentation about "Xing/OpenBC growing pains", held by Erick Dennis und Michael Otto from epublica, the company behind Xing.com.

The talk will be held in english and is a rehearsal for their presentation at our upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo, which will take place from April 23rd-26th in Santa Clara, California. Please subscribe to our …

So far, the MySQL Server RPM packages as provided by MySQL AB used to automatically start the mysqld process after the package has been installed. It has been like that since the very beginning and we think of it as a convenience for our users when they want to get up and running quickly.

However, Kristian raised an interesting point in BUG#27072 where he points out that automatically starting mysqld during the RPM installation might not always be the desired behaviour, especially in automatic installation environments or during a fresh installation (where the system might not be fully configured yet). Therefore he proposes to change this behaviour to not start mysqld as part of the installation.

While I personally agree with his proposal, this is of course a tricky decision: our users are familiar with …

I just stumbled over Sebastian's blog entry:

The second Free and Open Source Conference "FrOSCon" takes place on August, 25th and 26th 2007 in Sankt Augustin, near Bonn, Germany. The conference is once again hosted by the faculty of computer science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in collaboration with the student body and the Linux/Unix User Group Sankt Augustin.

I attended FrOSCon last year and found it a very pleasant conference to be …

Due to a small mail filtering glitch we did not notice a number of new feed submissions for Planet MySQL that had been sent to us via the submission form since the beginning of the year. Doh!

Today I discovered them in a separate mail archive and have now added all the ones that were not spam or unrelated to MySQL.

So if you recently submitted your RSS feed and you don't see it aggregated on Planet MySQL by now, please resend your submission. Thanks and we're sorry for the delay and inconvenience!

Klick on the image for the story. :)

My MySQL Sandalcamp proposal made the cut for the upcoming MySQL Conference. I hope that I will see some of you down in Santa Clara in April.

FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting will again take place in Brussels, Belgium on February, 24th & 25th. I went there last year and really had a great time. This year, I submitted a proposal for a lightning talk, which has been accepted! I've just been informed that the lightning talk schedule is now published. My talk "What's new at MySQL AB" will be on Saturday, at 17:00. I look forward to being there!

I just noticed that the schedules for the Sessions and Tutorials of our upcoming MySQL Conference & Expo (which takes place on April 23rd-26th in Santa Clara, California) is now online. The program looks very promising and I am particularly excited that some of the sessions that I have helped to arrange made it into the final program:

• openBC / Xing: Growing Pains by Michael Otto and Erick Dennis from ePublica
• PrimeBase XT: Design and Implementation of a …