I am happy to announce that the first MariaDB book is released!

The book is called MariaDB Crash Course and is written by Ben Forta, who also wrote the MySQL Crash Course book.

Quoting the book description:

"This book will teach you all you need to know to be immediately productive with MySQL. By working through 30 highly focused hands-on lessons, your MySQL Crash Course will be both easier and more effective than you'd have thought possible"

This is great news for new users to SQL and to MariaDB as it makes it easier for them to get things going quickly!

You can find a link to this book and other recommended MariaDB / MySQL books …

Exciting news – MariaDB gets its first book!

Many years ago I read Ben Forta’s MySQL Crash Course . It is a book targeted at beginners of MySQL. Ben has now written another book, titled: MariaDB Crash Course.

Its still targeted at beginners, and covers many of the new features that are available in MariaDB up to version 5.2. I had the pleasure of pre-reading it, and did send in lots of comments to Ben, and if implemented we’ll see some stuff in there that is current even for MariaDB 5.3, like dynamic columns and …

You can now enjoy  SQL-99 Complete, Really by Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer aka. “The Definitive Door Stopper” online in our Knowledgebase at http://kb.askmonty.org/v/sql-99-complete-really.

Thanks to our technical writer and system administrator at Monty Program Ab Daniel Bartholomew we now have a complete description of the SQL-99 standard for syntax, data structures, and retrieval processes of SQL databases. As an example-based reference manual it includes all of the CLI functions, information, schema tables, and status codes.

Please make sure to check out our commenting system. You can add your …

Dear Kettle friends,

As mentioned in my previous blog post, copies of our new book Pentaho Kettle Solutions are finally shipping.  Roland, Jos and myself worked really hard on it and, as you can probably imagine, we were really happy when we finally got the physical version of our book in our hands.

So let’s take a look at what’s in this book, what the concept behind it was and give you an overview of the content…

The concept

Given the fact that Maria’s book, called Pentaho Data Integration 3.2, …

Recent Tips and News on Java EE 6 & GlassFish:

According to a recent book about MySQL, this is the recipe to convert an IP address into an integer, with the purpose of using it as server-ID.

1. Take for example 10.0.159.22
2. Using a calculator (!!!), convert each of the four numbers to hexadecimal (you get 0a.00.9f.16)
3. Then glue the four hexadecimal numbers together, after removing the dots, and, again with the calculator, convert them to decimal (0a009f16HEX=167812886DEC)
4. Use this number (167812886) as your server ID in the options file.

Brilliant, eh?

Had the authors searched the MySQL manual for "IP address", they would have found the INET_ATON function, which can be used like this:

select inet_aton('10.0.159.22'); …

The kind folks at O'Reilly sent me a fantastic book about MongoDB. This was a great read since it’s suited for people who do Operations and Development and Performance tuning (me). I've been using Cassandra for quite some time now (months lol) and the thing that has irritated me about Cassandra is the documentation for it. Cassandra documentation sucks, its hard to speed up on the internals. This MongoDB book is written by the most active participants that are developing MongoDB and the knowledge shows. What I like is it starts out on how to quickly get it up, add/get/update data to the DB. Then progresses to more advance topics-that talk about GridFS and MongoDB drivers. Personally I would like to see more elaboration of this facet in terms of motivation of why do this, what the win is and how it fits into the "Fast by Default" mantra. Each step is organized perfectly, …

SQL Antipatterns, by Bill Karwin
I remember that when I finished reading The Lord Of The Rings, I felt a pang of disappointment. "What? Already finished? What am I going to read now? What can give me the same pleasure and sense of accomplishment that these wonderful pages have given me?"
That's how I felt when I came to the last page of SQL Antipatterns. And, no, Bill Karwin doesn't tell imaginary tales from a fictitious world. This book is full of very real and very practical advice, but all the material is presented with such grace and verve that I could not put it down until the very end. I read it cover to cover in just a few hours, and I savored every page.

What is this Antipatterns, anyway? The title may deceive a casual bookshop browser into believing that it's about some philosophical database theory. Digging further, you realize …

mysql > start review;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql > Being a MySQL DBA, not a developer, I was mostly interested in the MySQL sections but given I have a general interest in scripting I did go through some of the PHP sections. To be honest they were quite advanced for my php knowledge and experience.

The good thing about the book is that even though it assumes you have the basic knowledge, it still provides an introductory background on most of the two (PHP and MySQL) topics. This is not a “PHP and MySQL for dummies” so don’t expect to learn the very basics nor will you become an expert in either topic by just reading the book. Even if you read the book thoroughly, becoming an expert requires years of hard work and experience. Having said that, his book is a good guide to make it there.

If you are at least a basic developer, this book will help you increase your knowledge drastically and …