I understand that MySQL as a company wants to recruit paying customers. However, as a community user I have a hard time finding what I want on the MySQL website. Today’s frustration is brought to you by trying to find the documentation.

Go ahead, hit http://www.mysql.com. From there, where do you go to find the documentation?

It’s not Services, not even Services -> Support.

According to Products, the community server is not even a product. How is a potential new user, who wants to learn about MySQL, supposed to know a community version exists? Here are the products listed on the Products page:

MySQL Enterprise
MySQL Enterprise Monitor
MySQL Cluster
MySQL Embedded Database
MySQL Database Drivers
MySQL Database Tools

Where’s “MySQL Database” on that list? A website user basically has to know what they’re …

Contemporary software engineering models include many loosely-defined layers. Database developers might help with other layers, but for the most part a database administrator’s domain is the persistence layer.

• 
  
• Presentation
  
• Application
  
• Business Logic
  
• Persistence (also called Storage)
  

The Daily WTF has an article on The Mythical Business Layer makes the case for not separating the business layer and the application layer:

A good system (as in, one that’s maintainable by other people) has no choice but to duplicate, triplicate, or even-more-licate business logic. If Account_Number is a seven-digit required field, it should be declared as CHAR(7) NOT NULL in the database and …

All of the videos from the 2008 MySQL Conference have been processed and uploaded. Links to the videos, slides, notes, photos for each presentation are all on the mega-conference page at:
http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008Notes

This represents many hours of my own toil, but it also reflects plenty of people who have blogged, edited the wiki pages and speakers who wrote and gave tutorials and presentations. I am proud of everyone’s efforts to offer so many learning resources for free….

Enjoy! EDIT: I forgot to thank Jay, the folks at O’Reilly and all the speakers for giving me explicit permission to video and freely offer their presentations.

If you know of any video, audio, notes, slides, photos, etc that are not linked, please link them at the wiki page. If you can’t or won’t, please comment here and I will update the wiki …

(If you want $100, you will have to read the entire blog post. Sorry for the tease, but I did not want folks to miss out on the opportunity to win!)

By now it is no surprise that I won one of the three 2008 MySQL Community Member of the Year awards. And folks may know that I won the same award last year.

One interesting fact you may not know: during the 2006 MySQL Awards Ceremony, where Giuseppe Maxia, Roland Bouman, Markus Popp and …

I have already blogged about this keynote at http://www.pythian.com/blogs/948/liveblogging-who-is-the-dick-on-my-site.

If you are interested in actually seeing the video, the 286 Mb .wmv file can be downloaded at http://technocation.org/videos/original/mysqlconf2008/2008_04_17_panelDick.wmv and played through your browser by clicking the “play” link at http://tinyurl.com/55c5ps. This is not to be missed!

Keith Murphy wrote about the open/closed source debacle and the first comment on that post was:

Monty makes all this money from the Sun acquisition, and pretends to be a free software advocate. How much did he make? How much is he giving back to the MySQL community?

Now, Keith rightfully met this with “grow up”. However, I want to point out that many people in the MySQL employee pool benefited from the sale, not just Monty. I also want to point out that Monty devoted years of his life to developing MySQL long before it was ever profitable.

According to Sun’s press release, “Sun will pay approximately $800 million in cash in exchange for all MySQL stock and …

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, The Pythian Group gave away EXPLAIN cheatsheets. They were very nice, printed in full color and laminated to ensure you can spill your coffee* on it and it will survive.

For those not at the conference, or those that want to make more, the file is downloadable as a 136Kb PDF at explain-diagram.pdf

* or tea, for those of us in the civilized world.

In a despicable business practice, I received a message from a PR Firm representing Ingres. Now, I even wrote about the controversy that seems to have swept the open source community; but even my writings were not completely factually correct — I wrote that even if online backups were closed it was not necessarily the worst thing in the world. The actual parts of the online backup that are not open source and free are compression and encryption — that is all.

So really, we are talking about a very small part of backup. The last I saw most people used their own compressing (ie, | gzip -c) and encryption for backups. And honestly, I would rather use tried and true compression and encryption than something new that MySQL comes up with, so I do not even see most people wanting compression nor encryption.

But that’s besides the point. If Ingres thinks they can win customers over by swooping in when a controversy is happening, …

Jeff Rothschild of Facebook’s “A Match Made in Heaven? The Social Graph and the Database”

Taking a look at the social graph and what it means for the database.

The social graph:

• At it’s heart it’s about people and their connections.
  
• Learning about people who are in your world.
  
• Can be a powerful tool for accelerating the use of an application.
  

“The social graph has transformed a seemingly simple application such as photos into something tremendously more powerful.” We’re interested about what people are saying about us, and about our friends. Social applications are compelling.

Facebook users blew through the estimate for 6 months of storage in 6 weeks. It is serving 250,000 photos per second at peak time, not including profiles. Facebook serves more photos than even the photo sites out there, and serves more event invitations …

Identity 2.0: A world that’s simple, safe and secure.

Who is the Dick on My Site? by Dick Hardt (Sxip Identity Corporation)

Quotes:
“Really, data is about people. It’s really identity data.”

“Identity helps you predict behavior.”

“Identity is who you are.”

“Identity is also what you like.”

“Identity enables you to uniquely identify somebody.”

“There are things that other people say about you, too.”

“Modern identity is about photo IDs so you can prove your identity.”

“Identity is a complicated issue….Everyone has a different idea of what it is.”

Identity transactions are:

• party identification (who)
  
• authorization (permission)
  
• profile exchange (info about that person)
  
• NOT record matching
  

Identity transactions can be: …