I have written a new book on SQL DML. This is a total beginner book: how to commit and rollback, how to query, how to add data, etc.

Probably not of interest to most of the people who read this blog but if you know of anyone completely new to SQL, this would make a great Christmas present. Only 14.95. It is completely vendor agnostic, although the examples all use Oracle and MySQL.

You can view the Table Of Contents, Preface and Index here. I plan to release some of the chapters for free on the blog and will make the PDF of the book available at a discount. I have several more books like this (DDL, Intro to Relational Databases and Cloud Computing) under construction. I also plan to do some …

I spent way too much time this weekend trying to get the pager stuff in Drupal working for a module I`m playing with.

I had learned a lot from the watchdog module on how paging was supposed to be working and I was trying to do the same with another database. As I got a page limited by the number of records I wanted but I couldn't find any of the fancy next, previous and page number thingies that I wanted.

The watchdog module worked for me and I started stripping the watchdog module till I could actually replace my function with watchdog_overview function. Even replaced the watchdog query with my qeury.. but not such luck.. I couldn't get $output .= theme('pager', NULL, 50, 0); to work.

So as every open source geek does.. I started looking into the code. pager.inc
The header told me the author.. I could mail him and wait …

I remember the first time I downloaded MySQL. I think I was using Mandrake Linux. Anyway, the install was fairly painless but once it was installed, I had no clue how to run queries.

I was coming from an Oracle background and was used to SQL*Plus. I was also familiar with PostgreSQL and psql. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to get into MySQL.

So, for you developers and brand new users, you can easily start MySQL and start using it. This is not meant for a production installation, just for playing on your laptop or desktop.

Start MySQL by running mysqld (mysqld.exe on Windows). It will be in your MySQL home/bin directory. That gets the server portion of our program running.

The SQL*Plus equivalent is mysql (or mysql.exe). If you are logging in for the first time, you can use root. Once you are in, you can create other users.

To log in and run commands, type: …