Je suis désolé que mon français est trés mauvais. But I am very eager to change this. So some day the previous sentence will actually be somewhat grammatically correct. I am not really aiming for written perfection, but I want to be able to hold a decent casual conversation in French without forcing the other person to switch to German or English all the time. I decided this a few weeks ago. However now I have been accepted to speak in Montreal at the mostly French speaking PHP Quebec conference!

Sorry for the delay. I still do not have SSL on my blog and I it took me a while to figure out how to properly tunnel my browser through ssh. Now that I have it setup (or all the sniffers can now use my blog) here is the link to the slides. The goal of the talk was to provide some hints on good and bad ideas. More importantly I wanted to illustrate that you can do a lot of stuff in SQL, that most people think can only be done inside their middle tier language.

At first sight it seems MySQL AB has learned the lesson from its 5.0 release and is not rushing as much anymore with their releases as much. It seems that the 5.1 GA release was pushed back from this fall to Q1 2008. MySQL 6.0 will feature the new Falcon storage engine, but without foreign key and full text indexing. That will have to wait for MySQL 6.1. Now 6.1 is supposed to go into beta 2008/2009 which means a GA release is expected in 2009. So when exactly is MySQL 6.0 supposed to be done then? Last I heard was fall 2008, which would mean GA release for 6.0 and the beta release for 6.1 to be pretty close.

Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November. The short summary is that the examples are very well chosen (while a bit light on the Javascript side), the writing style is very good, the examples are riddled with minor to major oversights and formatting errors. I will send a long list of the errors I found to Pakt, so be sure to keep the errata handy once one is released while looking through the code examples.

This was the title of an article back in 2002 by Shelley Doll and other articles with more or less the same concerns including the secretary of the ANSI database committee. In my recent blog post I made the point that I do hope that MySQL AB tries to follow the standards as much as possible (while retaining the freedom to add things as deemed necessary .. LIMIT and friends). In a chat conversation with Jan, he asked me what my thoughts are in regards to the SQL standard in particular. Most people will for example agree that standards compliant SQL routines are no fun to write. Unfortunately I had to agree with him that SQL today isn't what it should be.