My wife wants to learn database design. She is an archaeologist. She wants to read a book written in plain English, not h4×0r jargon. She is smart and capable and knows her own data, but does not know SQL or database theory. She wants to be able to design databases and be understood by others who know database design. She also wants to be able to explain her ideas to a programmer who will build the systems she’s designing. Is there a book for her?

Books, Database Design

My friends Theo Schlossnagle, Laura Thomson and Chris Shiflett are each presenting at ApacheCon Europe. They are each excellent presenters with solid content - I have seen Theo present at a previous ApacheCon, caught Laura at several OSCONs and finally saw Shiflett speak at the PHP Quebec conference earlier this year.

The deal is simple - sign up for any of their tutorials before the early bird deadline for the conference closes (on June 6th) and get complementary copies of some of the speaker’s book(s).

The sessions are:

• Advanced Production Troubleshooting …

Ben Forta is the author of several “Teach Yourself” books, among which you may be familiar with his Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes (us; uk). His new book, MySQL Crash Course, (us; …

As I mentioned last week, I got a copy of Alex Davies and Harrison Fiskâ??s book MySQL Clustering (us; uk). The book is not very big, and with some 14 stuck-in-an-airplane-seat hours available, I got a chance to read through the remaining chapters.
It will be easy to claim that this is the book on MySQL Cluster, but since it’s so far the only one in existence, I guess I’ll have to reserve judgment on that …

It's been a while since I've written. Sorry to all 1 of my fans :). I am just very busy with work. So, two things.

First is a blog my friend Joel started: http://www.browserlessweb.com/ . I suggest reading it, it's not PHP or MySQL centric, but the things he talks about should affect anyone who reads this blog.

Second item: My Employer is looking to hire some people

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• You need to be in Herndon, Virginia, or within driving distance. (no telecommuters, no relocation package)
  
• You must have good working experience with PHP in an enterprise environment (very high visibility site).
  
• We will not hold your hand in a linux environment. You must be comfortable with vim, emacs nano, joe,jed, pico whatever.
  
• Some experience with teams larger …

I just received a copy of Alex Davies and Harrison Fisk’s book MySQL Clustering (us; uk).

I had the honor of reading a few of the chapters before they were published, and this looks to be a really excellent hands-on guide for setting up your own clusters. It takes you all the way from a thorough understanding of the types of nodes that make up a cluster, hardware requirements and initial setup through security and management to tuning and troubleshooting.

This is good …

Whenever we are faced with a choice between two designs, and the first design is upward compatible with the second (i.e. the first design is more restrictive, and implementing design two would not affect functionality provided by design one), and the full impliciations of the second design are not yet known, the first design choice is recommended.
Formulated by C.J. Date in "Relational Database: Writings 1989-1991"

I've always regarded Andy Hertzfeld as the quintessential Mac programmer.  He was on the original Macintosh team back in the early 1980s, wrote much of the user interface code, wrote the first task-switching program, founded Radius, General Magic, and then later became involved in open source through a commpany he founded called Eazel. 

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Mac, Hertzfeld created a collection of stories on the early days at Apple, which he published at www.folklore.com under a creative commons license.  He also made the underlying software available under an open source license.  For those who remember fondly the days of the early Mac it's exciting to relive those old days.  The stories were later published by O'Reilly as the coffee table book called " …

Jay Pipes, co-author of "Pro MySQL" published by Apress joined MySQL recently as our latest community guy.  Jay is an excellent fit for the company.  He has a terrific "can do" attitude and has been out writing and blogging about MySQL for ages.  Not only is he a MySQL expert, he's also a great speaker and keen to help out on community projects.  Soon enough we'll be letting him loose speaking at conferences including our own MySQL Users Conference in April. 

• Amazon: Pro MySQL
• Blog: …

A few recent books:

"Foundation for Future Database Systems. The Third Manifesto" by C.J. Date and Hugh Darwen.
An interesting and controversial book. In many cases completely rejects some practical arguments for the sake of purity of the model. A funny book too, as according to it, SQL is not a true relational language, which is a good reference to use when fingers are pointed at MySQL not being a relational database. Also gave a valuable insight why Bug#5719 should not be fixed. Despite this high appraisal, I don't think the book matches its title.

"C++ Coding Standards" by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu.
A must-have book for C++ programmers, 200 pages of best programming style practices: basically, a summary of well-known sources, …