Just want to say thanks

Hey,

I just found out I've been awarded an iPOD for the beta challenge! Amazing, when I received that June (yep, June already, time just flies when you're having fun) issue of the MySQL newsletter, I decided to try and do something.

As I recall, people were being teased to participate by promising them stuff like coffee mugs, T-shirts....Wich immediatly deepened my breath, and made my heart go BOOM,BOOM,BOOM as you might reckon!

Seriously, what convinced me to download the 5.0.7 release, was Arjen Lentz's "call to arms" to evaluate MySQL 5: a be-real, no-nonsense and to-the-point kind of appeal to test the new release of that well known open source rdbms, and this time, it was harbouring all kinds of enterprise grade features: stored procedures, views, triggers. At least, those were the features that I recall being mentioned repeatedly, let's say, the stuff that lets developers and programmers write more code.

Now, those that read some of the entries in blog probably wouldn't 've guessed it, but I hate writing code. I like to think about code, I just don't like writing it. Being an IT-consultant, database developer and information analyst, this attitude poses a problem, as people sure as hell expect me to deliver code, at least some of the time. Some while ago, I found ways of partially solving the paradox, by having as much of my code being generated for me, giving me more time to just think of what kind of could should be generated in the first place.

Now, to generate code, you need a solid source of information that you can use to drive the generation process. From the practice of generating code, I was already knowledgable about the INFORMATION_SCHEMA standard. So, when I noticed that MySQL was going to go along that road as well, I just had to check it out. Apart from offering a platform for wich you could code, this was also going to be a platform for wich I could go and build code generators too! So that's how I came about drawing that diagram, mainly to get myself acquainted with MySQL's implementation of the INFORMATION_SCHEMA standard.

And you bet, I want to get acquainted, because the way I see it, with this release, MySQL has taken a major step towards the direction of leading RDBMS vendors, at least feature-wise (at least One Of these vendOrs seems tO think sO tOO). I really think it's a mistake to, like I see too many of my colleagues do, keep ignoring MySQL as a product that you can do serious business with. I mean business as in: adding value for my customers, making Real Money with it etc.

Once I had the diagram, I thought, c'mon, let's share that stuff. Since then, I've had some valuable feedback on the diagram from Carsten Segieth and Mike Lischke, wich I think is great. I have already commited myself to maintaining it and keeping it up to date, and I'm going to recreate it in MySQL Workbench real soon. And Andrew Gilfrin's given me an opportunity to publish a code generator based on the mysql information_schema on his site. And now, there's this award. It may not be the coffee mug I hoped for, but I guess an iPOD's nice too ;-D. Terrific, I love it!

So, thanks Carsten and Mike, thanks Andrew and thank you very much Arjen. And of course, thanks to MySQL AB for developing this great product, and making it accessible to so many people. MySQL Rocks!

(walks of the stand, flowers in one hand, iPod in the other, almost bursting in to tears...whoops, I better quit this post)