Lorenzo has startet working on better charset support in MDB2. He has added basic support for setting charsets and collations inside field definitions in CVS already. However, there are still plenty of open questions to look at. I have only limited experience with charsets in MySQL. Lorenzo has some experience with Firebird and PostgreSQL. But this is no where near sufficient to come up with a solution that would work reasonably well across all supported drivers. Check out his charset RFC on his blog. Comments are very much appreciated, even if they just highlight problems without giving a solution just yet.

After spending a good week at my parents in rainy but relaxing florida, I flew to Toronto to speak at php|works. The conference was great fun and especially my second talk Explaing Explain went as good as I had hoped. In the talk I was mostly talking about controlling execution plans with particular focus on MySQL and PostgreSQL. I spend longer than ever on this talk so I am happy it worked out so well. I will probably submit the same talk for OSDBcon with some minor tweaks. Since I only had 60 minutes several slides are marked "skip". Maybe OSDBcon can give me two slots so that I can cover those slides as well. The other talk building portable database applications suffered a bit from my magalomaniac attempt at giving the gist of 3 talks in one slot. Sorry that we did not have any time for Q&A as a result.

There were some rumors going around that OSDBcon might get canceled, but I was just speaking to Zak and he confirmed that S&S, the company organizing the event, is committed to making the conference happen. Last I heard there are over 30 proposals with more coming in everyday. But the more the better! This years conference is being held once again in parallel with the International PHP Conference. However I think this is suboptimal. PHP developers for the most part are actively using open source databases already. Especially the MySQL guys have no trouble reaching the PHP guys with conferences dedicated to PHP. So it would be a good idea to to think about how to best get access to other audiences, like the Java and .Net crowd.

While there are some major annoyances with transactions in MySQL like causing an implicit commit when doing DDL statements, there are also slightly more subtle annoyances. A user just stumbled over a little annoyance in MySQL transaction handling and autoincrement. If you generate a new ID inside a transaction and rollback, the autoincrement counter is not decremented.

In order to make the transistion for users upgrading to new minor (middle number increment) and major (leading number increment) version of PHP easier, the PHP project has recently begun adding a README with upgrade information with new releases. This guide steps through any issues that users are likely to be faced when upgrading their PHP installations.