Author's announcement that the MySQL Bible, for beginner and intermediate MySQL DBA's, is available. The book is suitable for those completely new to databases, or those that are familiar with another RDBMS (such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server) and want to learn how MySQL works.

About six months ago, the question of storing images in a database came up. This is one of my favorite topics, and has many database-agnostic parts.Personally, I think "tell me about storing images in a database" is actually a great interview question, because you will be able to see the difference between someone who has just memorized "what's right" versus someone who is really thinking. It also helps you see how someone will communicate -- if they just say "NEVER do it, it's as bad as crossing the streams!" then they are a type of person that gives you a short answer, without much explanation, and without many nuances. (That may be what you are looking for, but usually you want someone who gives reasons for why they strongly feel one way or another).Consider the following cases:

Continuent CTO Robert Hodges talks about future of database clustering and how Tungsten open source project fits in that picture

Includes: the link to the playlist for all 11 videos plus 11 individual links to each video: Spider: Sharding for the Masses - Giuseppe Maxia A Better mysqltuner - Sheeri Cabral (my session!) Getting acquainted with Apache Derby - Kristian Wagaan New kid on the block: The BlackRay Data Engine — Felix Schupp MySQL High Availability Solutions — Lenz Grimmer Bringing Master/Slave into the 21st Century using Tungsten Database Clustering — Linas Virbalas PBXT: Technology trends that affect your database — Vladimir Kolesnikov MySQL Proxy: a MySQL toolbox - Architecture and concepts of misuse — Jan Kneschke Galera Replication, multi-master synchronous replication for MySQL — Seppo Jaakola Panel Discussion: The OSS Toolshed Shootout Speakers and technologies: Sheeri K. Cabral - MySQL; Holger Klemt - Firebird; Felix Schupp - BlackRay;  []

A book review by Baron Schwartz.

MySQL users often dream about a more powerful yet stable database server. They want a server with more features, like expanding macros, customized logging, access to shell commands, access to live tables from other DBMS. Every feature, given enough development time, can be eventually implemented, but users want them now, with the current GA server. It can be done. Using a proxy server, some of those dreams come true. Today.