A while back Tobias published an article on MDB2 and MDB2_Schema on the oracle technology network (OTN for short). Since MDB2 has gone stable since and has seen some API adjustments I just wanted to update some of the points in the article. However most changes do not affect the article. So here are just a few points:

After I put out my call for assistance for writing MDB2 docs I got a lot of positive feedback from people who wanted to help. Unfortunately nothing concret has materialized. So I decided its time that I jump start the effort by completing the bulk of step 1 in my call to action. The core API of MDB2 is now documented in the official PEAR manual. Enjoy and feel free to expand.

I just tweaked the URLs to specific messages on my blog quite a bit. The URLs that were previously generated as follows:

I spend the past week in florida. First visiting my parents and then spending time at php|tek where I was invited to give two talks. I was quite nervous about the first talk about "database schema deployment". My original intention was to create a working solution to handle scripting the necessary DDL and DML statements to manage schema updates. However while researching the topic I found that its even less trivial than I expected. So during my talk I was mainly giving some basic ideas along with a number of ideas to explore depending on the needs. For example if all you care about is generating DDL then things are quite simple. In the past MySQL indirectly benefited from the simplicity of the database but with foreign keys, views, stored procedures and triggers even generating DDL is not entirely trivial anymore. If you also need DML then things get instantly more complex.

Many MySQL critics have complaint about the lacking of key features, scalability and standards compliance. They also often complain about users who fall for MySQL's successful marketing, short of blaming the inherit evil nature of the universe why such inferior technology is so popular.