My newest book, MySQL Crash Course , is now shipping. This book is based on my bestselling Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes , and builds on top of the lessons and structure of that book. By focusing on just MySQL, this book goes into far more detail than the SQL book, and even includes...
Oracle has released a beta of Oracle Database 10g Express Edition , an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute. And yes, it works with ColdFusion MX 7. Thanks to John Farrar for bringing this to my...
The long awaited MySQL 5 has been released. New to this significantly update are views , triggers , stored procedures , and more. I've been using MySQL 5 since very early beta days, and it has been solid and stable (and every bug I reported has been fixed). Download your copy now.
I've spent a chunk of the weekend playing with the latest Community Technology Preview (CTP) edition of the forthcoming Microsoft SQL Server 2005 , and I am more than impressed. And I am not even talking about features, functionality, or the installation and configuration experience (which was, by...
I now have books available in Russian! Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes (3rd edition) and Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes have both just been released in Russian by Williams Publishing. Links to the new Russian editions are on the book pages. The full list of non-English...
Back in 2000 I posted a tip on using SQL Server triggers to obtain assigned identity field values. Someone recently asked if this was doable in MySQL, and the answer is yes, now that MySQL 5 finally provides basic trigger support. Suppose you had a table named products which contained a column...
MySQL is a great DBMS. I use it regularly because it is fast, lightweight, portable, and it just works. But it is also a really annoying product at times, demonstrating its grass roots community driven upbringing. Case in point: MySQL is not a single DBMS engine, it is actually a collection of...
Ugh, I just wasted time debugging a MySQL script only to find that I had created a syntactically invalid comment. So, as a future reminder to myself (and to warn others), MySQL supports 3 different comment styles: # marks the start of a comment (until the end of the line) -- also marks the start of...