I started my company about a year ago, but I’ve been doing consulting for a long time. In fact, my first job in the IT industry was working for a consulting firm. Before that, starting as far back as grade school, I was involved in a lot of volunteer civic and community service activities. I admire companies who get involved in their communities, or even outside of their communities, wherever help is needed.

As part of my business plan, I’ve put in place a policy of accepting one pro-bono consulting project per year. So far, I haven’t gotten any requests for free consulting work, so here’s my public shout out to let you know what types of services are available:

1. Speaking or Training. My specialties are things like advanced Linux administration and SQL, but I’m perfectly capable of delivering content for people who just need to know how the internet works, or want to …

MySQL Connector/Net 6.0.4, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver
for MySQL has been released.  This is the first post-GA release of the new
6.0 connector and includes several bug fixes from the initial GA release. 

This release is approved for use in all scenarios and officially
supports MySQL servers 4.1 and higher.   It is now available in source and binary form from
[http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.0.html] and mirror sites
(note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time
- if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later
or choose another download site.)

IMPORTANT
We have had some reports of installer problems with this package. We are working hard to find the problem. For now it appears that making sure your system is fully updated sometimes helps.  We will release …

I am reading SQL and Relational Theory by C. J. Date. Baron Schwartz wrote a nice review for it. I am reading the online version, about half way through, so am not sure if it has an accompanying CD with source code. In any case, if you want to play with some SQL code listed in the book, here is the script to generate the tables and rows (or should I say relations at a certain point in time with tuples?)

CREATE TABLE S
   ( SNO    VARCHAR(5)   NOT NULL ,
     SNAME  VARCHAR(25)  NOT NULL ,
     STATUS INTEGER      NOT NULL ,
     CITY   VARCHAR(20)  NOT NULL ,
     UNIQUE ( SNO ) ) ;

 CREATE TABLE P
   ( PNO    VARCHAR(6)   NOT NULL ,
     PNAME  VARCHAR(25)  NOT NULL ,
     COLOR  CHAR(10)     NOT NULL ,
     WEIGHT NUMERIC(5,1) NOT NULL ,
     CITY   VARCHAR(20)  NOT NULL ,
     UNIQUE ( PNO ) ) ;

 CREATE TABLE SP
   ( SNO …

I’ve been to the Chicago MySQL meetups a few times at Uncommon Ground near Wriggly Field. Honestly I don’t think I gained much out of it. The few times I was there, the group was small, which is not necessarily bad. (In fact, a small group can even be a good thing.) But the thing got me was that there was too much talk, not enough action. I haven’t been to its meetings for a few years so I cannot comment on its state after I left.

When I think a user group, I think about fans getting together hacking stuff: demonstrating cool tips and techniques, dissecting a new technology such as MySQL proxy by a user who have done that and learned some hard lessons along the way with no marketing talk, discussing solutions to problems a user has, providing pointers and efficient scripts, etc. In such a setting, each member of the group takes turns providing his/her expertise. The presenter does not necessarily needs talking slides, but must prepare …

One of our colleagues, Dimitri, at the Paris Sun solution center has developed a real neat and useful tool called dim_STAT. To make it short it's a tool for both high-level and detailed, monitoring and performance analysis of Solaris and Linux systems.

Data is collected and saved in a MySQL database, and it provides a very functional web base user interface. It allows real time or off line monitoring, multi-host etc.

Actually what is really interesting with dim_STAT is that, when I'm benchmarking or tryinng to find a performance bottleneck, I can collect all the data I need and come back later for analysis.

Recently, Dimitri has added a new tool db_STRESS, that allows us to put load on a database system and gives a high level metric (TPS: Transactions per seconds) and therefor allows us to compare how different systems compare together.
The point of this post is …

One of our colleagues, Dimitri, at the Paris Sun solution center has developed a real neat and useful tool called dim_STAT. To make it short it's a tool for both high-level and detailed, monitoring and performance analysis of Solaris and Linux systems.

Data is collected and saved in a MySQL database, and it provides a very functional web base user interface. It allows real time or off line monitoring, multi-host etc.

Actually what is really interesting with dim_STAT is that, when I'm benchmarking or tryinng to find a performance bottleneck, I can collect all the data I need and come back later for analysis.

Recently, Dimitri has added a new tool db_STRESS, that allows us to put load on a database system and gives a high level metric (TPS: Transactions per seconds) and therefor allows us to compare how different systems compare together.
The point of this post is …

A few months ago I installed ActivePerl 5.10 on a Windows XP Pro workstation. Next I tried to install DBD::mysql using CPAN, it failed. When I browsed modules via ppm, a GUI in this version of ActiveState Perl on Windows, DBD::mysql was not listed as an available module.

I then downloaded the source code, manually modified the MAKE file, fiddled with Visual Studio NMAKE, compiled it a few times, without success.

Google revealed the existence of Strawberry Perl. So I removed ActiveState Perl, installed Strawberry, ran ppm install DBI, ppm install DBD-mysql. And it worked.

Fast-forward a few weeks, I started playing with EPIC, a plugin for Eclipse that supposedly provides a nice IDE for Perl development and debugging. As a result, I started fiddling with PadWalker, a prerequisites for EPIC. I couldn’t remember all the details now due to frustration, but suffice it …

We have started a new project wiki for MySQL Connector/Net.  It’s a little light in content right now but should grow rapidly.  It can be found here.  Please let us know what we can do better.

MySQL Connector/Net 6.0.3, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is the first GA release of the new 6.0 connector and introduces several new features and enhancements.  This release is approved for use in all scenarios and officially supports MySQL servers 4.1 and higher.   We had three major goals with this release:  speed, entity framework support, and a better Visual Studio experience.  I'm happy to report that we have met all three.

It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.0.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

Fixes from 6.0.2

…

MySQL Connector/Net 5.2.6, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This release is of GA quality and is suitable for  use in production environments.  We strongly urge you to  review the change log that is shipped with the product for a thorough review of the changes.

We have a ton of fixes in this release so please review the changelog and see if your favorite bug has been fixed.  This version officially supports all versions of MySQL from 4.1 and later.

It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.2.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

Changes since …