Tuesday, May 02, 2006

The MySQL Forums

I feel most honoured that I have been awarded a MySQL Community award 2006: it seems I'm this year's MySQL Forum "Leader".

(Well, you should not take the "Leader" bit very literally I guess - It just means I got a big mouth that's eager to tell someone else what I think about their problem :)

I'd like to congratulate the other Community Award Winners: Giuseppe Maxia for his excellent code contributions and technical articles; Markus Popp for his terrific articles, tips, and the db4free initiative; and of course: Rasmus Lerdorf for...well, so many things! I mean - I can't write this list: it's way too long and words fail here anyway.

Here's the award we all got:



Concerning the forums, I want to use this occasion to express my regards to Arjen Lentz and all those other people at MySQL that maintain the forum site. I really think that it is amazing that a public forum that is visited so often and by so many people, together displaying such an enormous diversity in background, nationality and skill level, is such a friendly, sociable place, that manages to maintain such a high level of quality concerning subject matter while being so accessible to less experienced users at the same time. So, thanks guys for providing this service.

In a previous blog entry, I already mentioned a couple of people whose forum posts were most helpful to me: Andrew Gilfrin, Jay Pipes and Felix Geerinckx. I'd like to mention a few other people that cut my eye while I was there:

Maurizio Nardò

Maurizio has displayed some very interesting and original ideas on UDF's and dynamic SQL

Mike Kruckenberg

Mike is a really knowledgable MySQL professional and co-author of Pro MySQL (Apress books). Once he digs in to a thread, he's not leaving until the poster is satified by an answer

Bob Field

Bob Field's been around for a while, helping people out with various issues

Peter Brawley

Peter Brawley is also one of these people that try to think together with the poster, instead of thinking for them



I've learned a lot by browsing through all of your posts - I still do. Thanks for that, and see you there next time.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Roland,

you're really very kind to mention me among other forum contributors. Within the constraints of my job and background as chemical engineer i'm just trying to learn and to use MySql, and I too found the forum to be an excellent tool to learn a lot from others and to share experiences and, why not, also some preliminary ideas.

As I value high the power of the forum as a learning tool, let me tell that i'm sincerely happy of you award. And I hope you enjoyed the trip to S.F., too.

rpbouman said...

Bless you! Who's this anyway? I know it's not Mike, and I'm guessing it's neither Maurizio nor Peter, so, is that you Bob?

Bob Field said...

No, this is me (Bob) and I am extremely flattered to see myself mentioned in your short list. I really enjoy helping others here and find it as you say, a most friendly and diverse environment.

rpbouman said...

Hi Bob,

how nice to hear from you! Mmm, maybe you know how the anonymous mystery gueast is? By bets are on Maurizio...

Anyway, what is your background Bob? I noticed you did quite some around the MS Access forum list?

kind regards,

Roland

Bob Field said...

I've spent about 20 years in the DEC/Compaq/HP universe working with first RSX and then VMS -- mostly ISAM files and interprocess communications. I also worked with Excel spreadsheets as far as I cared to go with them, and then wandered into Access, where I stayed contentedly until I discovered MySQL. In a lot of ways MySQL complements Access rather than replacing it totally. I find a tremendous amount of power and flexibility with a MySQL back end and either Access or Apache/PHP for an interface, although my years of command-line work in VMS make the MySQL command-line interface very natural for me.

Unknown said...

Nice blog Roland.
I have to wonder about the screenshots though. Did you give 2.3.0 a try? It has nicer OS blend-in graphics.

Then again, I often wonder how many people care about that anyway? Certainly in the data integration arena, much worse examples can be detected, hehe :-)

Matt

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