Preparing for a trip to Santa Clara
I learned today that I won one of the three Grand Prizes of the MySQL 5 contest. I was just on the phone with our marketing officer when Arjen's mail popped in this morning and I almost burst her ear yelling something like "I'll fly to Santa Clara"! Of course she had no clue what I meant, but she still realized that something made me really, really happy.
So I want to send a big "Thank you!" to the MySQL community team. Being really just the "new kid on the block" as Arjen puts it in his blog, the decision hit me by surprise. Yes, I continuously filed some bug reports since quite a while (the first one dating back to MySQL 4.1.1), but it's only a few week ago since I started my blog.
Well, I actually planned to start my blog for one year now and collected some of the ideas for MySQL related articles already, but (what a stupid idea, typical for developers) didn't want to use any existing blog software but instead planned to build my own solution in my already spare spare time. So unsurprisingly this took some time (and the software is still a work in heavy progress).
That's why I'm very happy to see that Roland Bouman and Markus Popp are amongst the Grand Prize winners as well, as their community work (together with that of Andrew Gilfrin and Giuseppe "The Wizard" Maxia) inspired me the most to finally start my own blog, too (despite my blog software still being in pre-alpha).
So now I'm happily looking forward to travel to the Users Conference 2006 in Santa Clara, to enjoy some exciting tutorials and sessions, learn more about a great product and of course (most of all) to meet the people behind and around it.
Until then I'll try to keep up with the work and publish some more articles on MySQL 5.0. That's what's planned to come until christmas:
- Follow-ups to my Stored Routine Debugger article: I still have to create a simple installation script, publish it to Giuseppe Maxia's great repository and give some examples for those who only want to use it and are not interested in its internals. Then of course the functionality should be extended, but I'm still fighting with a complete table deadlock that will probably make for another bug report.
- Second part of my Determine the current user article: This should be published by tomorrow, probably nothing new for any SQL crack, but maybe interesting for people that "grew up" with MySQL before 5.0 and never used triggers before.
- Localized
DATE_FORMAT(): I want to have a replacement for the built-in function which I can use for any language. A stored function and some translation tables should help to achieve that. - Undo for tables: That's another idea in its beginnings. With triggers, an additional logging table and some stored procedures we could easily add an undo feature to any table.
Suggestions welcome. And as I wrote in my mail to Arjen: Thanks to all the MySQL community members and all the MySQL developers. The MySQL community itself is the real Grand Prize!
